Just back from the Annual General Meeting of the One World Shop. OWS is the largest fairtrade retailer in Scotland, with shops in the major cities of Edinburgh and Glasgow. Town and city centres in the UK are dominated by factory retailers – identical shops, identical products, staffed by bored people doing identical standardised jobs. In contrast, OWS is run by dedicated people who have found a way to live their deeply-held values through their working lives. The result is obvious even to busy shoppers. The atmosphere in the shops is different – the staff are there because they believe in what they are doing, not just to pay the bills. Even the two shops are different, reflecting the different markets they serve and the choices of the people who work in them. The contrast with the heavily branded identikit chain stores could not be greater.

The guest speaker at the AGM was Andy Good of Equal Exchange, another Edinburgh based fairtrade company. Fairtrade in the UK started off with big tins of disgusting instant coffee drinkable only by a committed deviant minority. Today, it’s mainstream, with all major supermarkets forced by consumer demand to stock fairtrade products. This turnaround has been achieved by a network of small values-led companies like Equal Exchange, Twin Trading, Traidcraft, Triodos, etc. What is impressive is the way these small companies have developed their own areas of specialist expertise, but yet co-operate to create trading chains that span the globe. What ties them together is common vales, expressed in umbrella organisations like IFAT. This model is the complete oppositeof the supermarket model of “command and control” supply chains, own-branding any individuality into oblivion.

Can these small companies survive now that their retailers (like OWS) have to compete with the supermarkets for fairtrade business? Andy’s example of tea gives grounds for optimism. Supermarket demand requires bulk supplies, met by plantation-scale producers. Fairtrade requirements are driving up standards along this supply chain, which is good news for plantation workers. However, they are still employees, churning out a mass-market product for the plantation owners. Equal Exchange’s approach is to go to independent farmers, usually through co-operatives, to source specialist and higher quality products. Can this niche marketing work? well, do you want to spend the rest of your life drinking exactly the same cup of tea or coffee, if you can easily afford something better?

This vision of the future works for me – an increasing variety of specialist, quality produce, offered through retailers who have the knowledge and interest to explain the product to shoppers. It’s the complete opposite from fairtrade’s roots in catering-size tins of instant coffee. The trading model – specialist, independent producers and specialist independent shops – is a genuine “equal exchange”. No amount of creative marketing could apply that term to the stalinist economic model of the “pile it high, sell it cheap, reap the profits” of the UK multiple retailers.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 27th, 2007 at 10:36 pm and is filed under Fairtrade. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.