Fairtrade focuses on trading with poor and marginalized producer groups, helping them to develop skills and sustainable livelihoods through the trading relationship.

Fairtrade pays fair prices that cover the full cost of production and enable a living wage and other fair rewards to be earned by producers.

Fairtrade provides credit needed to allow orders to be fulfilled and pays premiums to be used to provide further benefits to producer communities.

Fairtrade encourages the fair treatment of all workers, ensuring good conditions in the workplace and throughout the supply chain.

Fairtrade aims to build up long-term partnerships with producers, rather than look for short-term commercial advantage. Such partnerships help to shorten the chain between producers and consumers.

Principles of Fairtrade

Fairtrade encourages fair treatment of workers ensuring good working conditions for all involved in the supply chain, working conditions that workers in richer countries so often take for granted.

Fairtrade advises on product development to help increase access to world markets. Poor people do not have the resources to research and market what they produce. Advice and information about the markets on the international scene, through a relationship of dialogue and respect, helps poor people utilise their strengths in local resources, skills and expertise to produce goods for the international market while maintaining their cultural integrity.

Fairtrade supports business initiatives in the developing countries by providing credit on fair terms. This avoids poor people having to go to the moneylenders who extract extortionate rates for providing credit.

Fairtrade promotes the empowerment of women, and discourages the use of child labour. Women and children in poor countries are often the ones who command least pay for their labours, and are most open to exploitation. When the adults in the family have equal and fair opportunities in their business initiatives and are paid a fair wage, there is not the need for children to work, and families are able to pay for education and health care for the family.

Fairtrade supports producer organisations in their social development projects enabling poor people access to health and education provision.

Fairtrade encourages environmental responsibility. The security of the future depends on the sustainability of the resources and materials used. Quality of living and working conditions also depend on responsible use and disposal of materials used. Fairtrade encourages the recognition of the need for systems of production and trade that are environmentally conscious.

Fairtrade campaigns to highlight the unequal system of world trade and raise public awareness of the principles of fairtrade. The rules of International Trade are unfair. For example, International rules of trade restrict access to the markets of richer countries by the poorer countries, while the same rules allow rich countries free access to the markets of poor countries. This seriously limits the market opportunities for poor countries, while favouring opportunities for the rich. Through challenging the inequities of the system of international trade and through the trading partnerships formed, fairtrade aims to open up access to world markets for producers in the developing world, ensure producers have fair pay and good working conditions, and place international trade on a more equitable footing.

Fairtrade pays fair prices. Often world market prices do not cover even the cost of raw materials. Fairtrade pays prices to the producers that reflect the true costs of production and enable a living wage.

Fairtrade gives producers in developing countries a better deal and allows them to help themselves to a better life and better future. Fairtrade is not charity: it is Justice