Fifteen Eighty Four

Fair trade has become a household name for many shoppers who encounter certified products on supermarket shelves. But behind those labels lies a complex global movement with a rich history. Based on my book “Fair Trade: Humanitarianism in the Era of Postcolonial Globalization,” here are five insights that reveal why it is worth exploring the stories behind those chocolate bars and coffee beans.

1. A Success Story

The fair trade movement stands as one of the most enduring and successful civic initiatives emerging from the 1960s. Built on multiple pillars—producers, campaigning organizations, alternative importing agencies (ATOs), world shops, and certification agencies—it has developed into a truly global network.

What began as a niche initiative by small groups of producers, fundraisers, and development activists has grown into a well-established web of connections. Most evidently, fair trade product sales have increased dramatically in volume over the last decades. Yet the movement’s success goes beyond market share. The movement has raised awareness about structural problems in the global marketplace, challenged stereotypes about the “developing world,” and pushed companies to take their corporate responsibility seriously.

Fair trade activism has transformed the narrative about global relations after the political decolonization of many parts of the global South since the 1950s. People from these parts of the world participated in the emerging fair trade network as advocates and activists, trade experts, skilled entrepreneurs and artisans who simply deserved fair economic opportunities and equitable treatment in global trade systems. Rather than portraying producers in the global South as helpless recipients of Northern goodwill, the movement has successfully reframed them as people with equal rights and abilities.

Challenging companies to stop selling products which had been made under sub-standard working conditions or bought by paying cutthroat prices, fair trade activists also provoked a discussion about the responsibility of businesses to those producing and buying their products. Activists used varying combinations of adversarial means like boycotts and collaborative approaches like certification. As a result, companies became concerned over preserving a positive public image, while people working within the business community gained insight into ways to improve the modus operandi.

2. Beyond Buying and Selling

In everyday life as in recent scholarship, fair trade is predominantly associated with buying and selling fair trade products like coffee and chocolate. Yet activists advocating more equitable global relations have historically employed a much wider repertoire of action. Boycotts, petitions to local councils and national governments, educational campaigns, and political lobbying have all been integral to the movement’s approach.

These diverse strategies were never separate from consumer activism but interwoven with it. Fair trade products were offered alongside informational materials in shops and other venues which created spaces for dialogue about global inequality. In the 1960s, activists highlighted inequities in cane sugar production and trade, using consumer campaigns as entry points for deeper political engagement. Similarly, the world shops which proliferated across Europe in the 1970s functioned not just as retail outlets but as community hubs for education and organizing.

The act of buying fair trade products was designed not as an end in itself but as a gateway to broader participation in transforming trade structures. Since the 1980s, financial support through the sales of fair trade products has become more important. The interconnection between selling products and activities like lobbying and education has remained a staple of fair trade activism.

3. A Postcolonial Phenomenon

Fair trade activism is a distinctly postcolonial phenomenon. As former colonies gained political independence, they quickly realized that political freedom did not automatically translate to economic equality. Initiatives in the global North took shape in direct response to the call for economic justice from the global South in the wake of political decolonization. The decolonized states leveraged their newly acquired political weight to establish the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). The first UNCTAD conference was held in 1964. Though the early UNCTAD conferences achieved limited concrete political results, they attracted considerable public attention that helped spark fair trade initiatives.

Different views on how equitable, postcolonial relations between the South and the North should be realized have lain at the core of many disputes within the fair trade movement. Behind the common slogan “trade, not aid” lay competing visions of economic justice—some focusing broadly on supporting the “Third World”, others on aligning with specific revolutionary states and their economic models, and still others on particular producer groups and communities.

These debates about how to conceptualize and implement economic justice in a postcolonial world have continued to shape the movement’s trajectory. They remind us that fair trade isn’t simply about paying slightly higher prices. The movement has contributed to reimagining the obligations of global citizenship and economic relationships in the aftermath of colonialism.

4. Promoting Sustainability

Fair trade and environmental concerns have been deeply intertwined, though not always in straightforward ways. Early connections included ties between fair trade groups and anti-nuclear activism and local environmental campaigns. Publicizing and joining demonstrations for environmental causes, selling recycled toilet paper in world shops, or offering organic coffee from brands like Lévelt brought these concerns together in practical ways. National and international umbrella organizations found it harder to reconcile these concerns, debating which should take priority—economic justice or environmental protection.

By the end of the 1980s, fair trade advocates attempted to synthesize social and environmental issues through the concept of “sustainability.” Fair trade activists developed different concepts of sustainability which foregrounded solidarity with revolutionary states, a reconciliation of social and environmental concerns through small-scale production, or a focus on organic production. This sheds light on the variety of interpretations of sustainability which have emerged in the post-war era.

The diversity of interpretations reminds us that “sustainability” encompasses concerns about social and economic inequality, the environment, local and global issues—making it a powerful but potentially ambiguous concept. The ability to integrate manifold ideas about improving the world was a major reason for the sustainability concept’s success, but it also means that supporters of “sustainable consumption” may have very different priorities and values in mind.

5. Material Connections

The materiality of products and means of communication has shaped the fair trade movement in profound ways. Material realities directly influenced which relations could be established and which issues could be publicized. Different products created varying possibilities for activism. Coffee presented a relatively straightforward supply chain to connect coffee farmers to consumers, while textiles involved complex, constantly shifting networks of production across raw materials, fabrics, sewing, and transportation.

Debates about what constitutes a legitimate “fair trade product” highlight the dual importance of materiality. For example, the 1970s debates about Sarvodaya tea from Sri Lanka were enabled by the exchange of paper letters, which were crucial for establishing who was selling what to whom between different groups involved in fair trade activism. When it was revealed that the tea was purchased on the regular market and resold to benefit the movement, activists in Amsterdam felt betrayed—they believed the product itself needed to convey a material relation between Sarvodaya’s members and their supporters in other parts of the world. In a lively exchange of letters, the Sarvodaya president insisted that the financial support and the visibility of Sarvodaya were what truly mattered.

Fair trade products and the materials used for communication constituted physical connections between producers and other parts of the fair trade movement. The materiality of the products and communication technologies shaped these connections. Before digital communications, determining factory conditions or establishing direct conversations with producer groups required enormous effort. Fair trade history highlights how new digital technologies enhanced activists’ ability to operate within a global network. It also reminds us that we should avoid a simplistic “shock of the new” narrative. Digital networks always operated alongside “old” physical product networks like textiles.

This focus on materiality also highlights inequalities within activist networks themselves—digital communication has transformed organizing capabilities but access remains uneven, and fair trade networks can only form around products for which customers are willing to pay. These constraints remind us that networks of solidarity simultaneously promote equality while remaining embedded in unequal relations.