Nestlé considers a fair-trade KitKat

Nowadays, Swiss food giant 'Nestlé' is considering to launch a fair-trade KitKat in the UK.
The chocolate bar ‘KitKat’ has a lot of success. Therefore, if the negotiations are successful, KitKat will become the biggest brand in the UK with a fair-trade certification.
It’s not the first time Nestlé pays attention to fair-trade. The food giant is already involved in sustainability initiatives and last month, the company launched a cocoa plan.
With this plan, Nestlé supports cocoa famers by the supply of disease-resistant plantlets and they give these farmers training to work better and more efficient. The fair-trade certification of Kitkat is very important, because it will raise the awareness of the importance of fair-trade products a lot.


Evelien Rooman
Source: food and drink europe

Reverse Trick-or-Treating

Especially on Halloween, Americans spend a lot of money on chocolate bars.
The children go trick-or-treating and ask for candy.
But a lot of the chocolate comes from plantations that use child slave labour.
Children aged between 11 and 16 work 12 hours a day, without a remuneration.
The farmers have to live in poverty. They can't pay those children because they don't get enough money for their chocolate.
In order to bring awareness about this problem to the American people, the Equal Exchange cooperative started ‘reverse trick-or-treating’ on Halloween.

How does it work? Fair Trade chocolate bars are attached to a card that explains what Fair Trade is.
When the child goes trick-or-treating, he or she can return a favor by giving this flyer and the chocolate bar to the adult. Also adults can raise awareness about this problem by giving these chocolate bars and flyers to a trick-or-treater instead of other candy.
This year, the action had a lot of success, more than 250,000 chocolate bars and flyers have been distributed to trick-or-treaters.
So, next Halloween: go reverse trick-or-treating!

Evelien Rooman
Source: the river reporter

How fair is Fair trade?

Nowadays Fair Trade products can be bought everywhere. But while the shoppers are buying the Fair trade products having this pleasant feeling that they are helping some poor farmer in Africa, other people question the effectivity of helping the third world in such a way.

What the Fair trade organization wants is to pay honest wages to Third World farmers. If any company is interested in receiving the Fair trade Label they should pay the farmers of the third world countries higher than their own market prices, so the farmers can invest that money in education for their children and all the kind of social need available in their country.

But not everyone is fund of the Fair trade system. Because the main goal of Fair trade is to give fair wages to the poor farmers, but in the meantime they forget that there is no evolution in the industrial sector or in the mechanization. If they would pay more attention to these two factors it would be possible to help a developing country on a much higher scale.
So how fair is this fair trade system? Does the organization only want that ‘some’ of these poor farmers can have a good life and can they just ignore the other millions of helpless citizens?

Jaskiran Singh

www.fairtrade/bbc.com

Fair trade original celebrates it’s 50th birthday

Fair trade original exists 50 years this year. The Dutch organization has the honor to celebrate the fact that they have been busy with the sustainable and ethical commerce for already a half a century. Their concept of honest commerce is nowadays used by several other organizations and big industries. Today the director of the Fair trade original in Belgium has established many contracts with business partners in Vietnam, Thailand and Tanzania.

This year the main reason of their celebration is that they have established active lobbies and several campaigns for better working circumstances and against child labour.

Fair trade original also invented a systematic strategy for monitoring and making the business partners in the third world countries stronger than they were before. Due to this strategy the organization has given these business partners the opportunity to enter into the main international business network.

Jaskiran Singh

http://www.fairtrade.be/135/Nieuws/

Fair trade untouched by the global crisis

Despite the financial crisis people continue to buy fair trade products.
In the Fair trade Foundation’s annual Commercial Conference every business and industrial leader got to find out how the Fair trade consumer stayed loyal to the Fair trade products despite the current recession.

TNS ( = latest awareness figures) shows that in September 2009 the people buying Fair trade products really recognize Fair trade as an individual mark, while in April 2009 only 68% of the buyers saw Fair trade as a mark. TNS also shows that consumers spend more money on Fair trade products over the past couple of months. The price of the products bought by the usual every day consumer increased by 5.5%.

To conclude we could say that Fair Trade products are generally becoming more and more popular and that leads to better sale figures which allows the Fair trade organization to pay higher wages to the farmers in the third world countries.

Jaskiran Singh

http://www.fairtrade.org.uk/press_office/press_releases_and_statements/september_2009/public_continues_to_buy_fairtrade_despite_the_recession.aspx