First coffee and chocolate, now entire towns obtain fair trade status

San Francisco is the seventh American community to join the movement.

Ama Kade harvests cocoa pods in Ghana. Kanya Osori grows rice in northeastern Thailand. Palemon Cuno Surco creates traditional Peruvian pottery in a small village near Cusco. They live thousands of miles away from each other, speak different languages and their cultures couldn’t be more different. But they do have something in common: people in Taos, N.M., and Media, Penn., want to buy their goods and pay them a fair price. So do the people in Amherst, Mass., and Milwaukee, Wis. These communities are part of a small but growing group committed to supporting fair trade, so much so that they’ve gone through the steps to become recognized as fair trade towns.

 

Products like coffee, rice, vanilla and tea that are certified fair trade assure decent working and living conditions, a fair price, and dignity for the people who produce them. It assures sustainable farming practices and investment in the local community. Fair trade is also good for communities here.

 

“Fair trade means community. It’s people coming together to improve their world.  Whether it’s farmers coming together in a cooperative, or consumers coming together as a community to reach out to those very same farmers, in the end it’s about the relationships we build,” says James Guzzi, outreach coordinator for the fair trade certification agency Transfair, and one of the individuals who worked to make San Francisco the country’s seventh, and most recent, fair trade town, or in this case, fair trade city.

 

The movement started in Europe where there are several hundred fair trade towns officially recognized by a fair trade certification body, like Britain’s Fairtrade Foundation. The model is a bit different this side of the pond. There is no single governing organization for fair trade towns in the U.S. Instead, it’s up to the communities themselves to declare their fair trade town status once they have met the five goals put forth by Fair Trade Towns USA, an independent organization created by local and national fair trade advocates. Not having an official certification process makes it easier to include fairly traded crafts and other products that may not carry the Transfair seal but come from businesses that follow the same principles.

 

Even though San Francisco only declared itself a fair trade town this past May 10, the groundwork had been laid long before. “Basically, we had the cart before the horse. We passed our laws long before there was a movement to recognize us, then went back and built the movement to recognize it,” says Guzzi. By 2005, the city already had some of the strongest fair trade and anti-sweatshop laws in the country, but in a city with a population of 760,000, getting fair trade city status took a little longer than it would for a smaller town.

 

The 18-month process in Taos, a town of 5,000 people, was relatively speedy compared to the three years it took in San Francisco. “It wasn't difficult, just time consuming,” says Steven Gloss, who started the process in Taos. “There were lots of initial meetings with town staff and procurement people to educate them about fair trade. Once they understood what it was, they’ve been on board and enthusiastic supporters.”

 

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