Discover your new favourite Fairtrade brand
To celebrate Fairtrade Fortnight, we’re introducing you to some of the brands doing their bit to help workers in the developing world. Fairtrade supports cooperatives – groups of local people who pool their talents and resources for economic gain. This ensures better wages, decent working conditions, and fair terms of trade for farmers and workers. They’re also eligible for a Fairtrade Premium. This extra money is paid on top of their wages, and can be invested in ways farmers and workers see fit.
CRU KAFE: RESPOND TO CLIMATE CHANGE
This coffee brand’s mission is to create coffee that tastes good, and does good too. Cru Kafe’s work with Fairtrade is helping farmers in Central America adapt to climate change.
Cru Kafe works with Fairtrade cooperatives supporting coffee farmers in places like Colombia’s Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountains. Did you know that more than 90% of the world’s coffee comes from small farms in poor economies? Alone, they’re too small to be treated fairly in a global marketplace. But, through brands like Cru Kafe, farmers are able to sell internationally. Fairtrade also helps farms protect against La Roya, a fungus that destroys the farmers’ crops, which affects more than half of the coffee-growing area of Central America, and it’s caused by climate change. Fairtrade provides farmers with new coffee seed varieties, tools, and sends in technicians to help implement sustainable techniques, and increase coffee productivity and quality.
QUINOLA: BETTER WORKING PRACTICES
In the last few years, quinoa’s become popular in the UK – but that’s come with a cost to both the environment and the communities it’s indigenous to. Problems the founder of Quinola wanted to do something about.
James Livingstone-Wallace founded Quinola after visiting Peru and experiencing quinoa’s rich cultural heritage. The Inca called it the mother grain and considered it a sacred gift from their gods. Today, Quinola works with more than 1,000 smallholders from two Fairtrade cooperatives near Lake Titicaca. Here, farmers work without pesticides and chemical fertilisers, instead using llama dung to enrich the soil. But it’s hard work. The farmers used to plough their fields with an ox – taking two days to work a hectare. But, through their Fairtrade Premium, members of the cooperative were able to purchase two tractors. Now, they can plough the same amount of land in under two hours, helping them farm faster and giving them back their free time.
CLIPPER TEA: LOOKING AFTER PEOPLE IN RETIREMENT AND EDUCATION
Clipper Tea is the largest Fairtrade tea brand in the world. They’ve awarded over £4,000,000 in Fairtrade Premiums in the last 25 years, changing people’s lives.
Clipper supports local communities by buying tea from the likes of the Korakundah cooperative in southern India, and it’s been life-changing for the people working there. Dodda Mahalingham and her husband, tea pluckers at the cooperative, plan to work there until they retire, when they’ll build a home together. This is possible because they receive a fair wage and a pension fund from the Fairtrade Premium. Dodda wasn’t able to go to school while growing up, but because of the bursaries Fairtrade offers, both of her sons are now in college. One is studying to be a chartered accountant, the other is studying IT.
Discover more ethical brands and explore some of our B Corp suppliers here.