Poor Farmer

Fairtrade products, such as the newly anointed KitKat, can offer little extra benefit to farmers and may even hold them back KitKats will soon carry the Fairtrade logo. Photograph: Chris North/PA via Guardian By Andrew Chambers Guardian December 12, 2009 Nestlé has just announced that KitKat – Britain's biggest-selling chocolate bar – will carry the Fairtrade logo from next month. But how much do consumers really know about the Fairtrade movement? Is it, as some say, an essential safety net that helps poor farmers earn a better living or, as others say, an example of western feel-good tokenism that holds back modernisation and entrenches agrarian poverty? There are now more than 4,500 Fairtrade items on our shelves. UK sales boomed by 43% in 2008 and the British government has announced a four-year £15m funding package for the organisation. Fairtrade provides a minimum baseline price for commodities, allowing farmers to hedge against market volatility. The co-operative...

Browse along the coffee shelves in a British supermarket and one finds that buying their favourite beans is no longer a simple matter of the taste and price. These days, the importers and roasters are likely to tell more about the ethics of their business than the flavour of their products, ELIZABETH BLUNT, SPECIAL TO FORTUNE, reports from London. Addis Fortune November 30, 2009 This is true across the whole range of price and quality, from top-of-the-range specialist coffees to mass-market brands like Lyons and Nestlé. With just a little help from Nescafé and its partners, a community of farmers in a coffee-growing region in Ethiopia have been working to improve their own lives, and the lives of their children.” Supermarket brands are no different. Sainsbury’s packaging for its Ethiopian coffee promises a “FairTrade” guarantee that its farmers in Sidamo receive a fair price for the coffee they grow, while Waitrose claims on the packaging of its Mocha Sidamo that, “While the qu...