Fair play

Last month I blogged about Project Good, an upcoming collaboration between World of Good and eBay to create a large online marketplace for ethically made products. The unnamed marketplace is still in the works (it should launch before the holidays), but you can get the latest scoop on it—and do some good at the same time—by signing up for the Project Good email list. For every 20 people who sign up, Project Good will donate a fair-trade soccer ball to Better World Cup in Africa.

In other news, October is Fair Trade Month. The fourth-annual one, even! To celebrate, Trans Fair USA, the organization that certifies fair-trade products in the States, is holding a video contest. Submit five minutes or less of footage demonstrating what fair trade means to you, and you could get flown to Peru  to visit a farmers co-op (hmm, I hope they’re going to offset all those carbon emissions).

Also in conjunction with Fair Trade Month, the Fair Trade Federation is launching the Fair Trade Towns initiative, modeled after the first such movement, in the U.K. This is not a certification program: unlike a package of fair-trade coffee, a fair-trade town does not get independently audited to ensure that it follows certain standards. The Fair Trade Federation doesn’t own the term fair-trade town.

Rather, the initiative is an invitation for municipalities to declare themselves as fair-trade towns, based on guidelines laid out by the Fair Trade Federation (that don’t necessarily have to be followed). A fair-trade town should have a steering committee, for example. It should pass a resolution in support of fair-trade principles. It should also have a certain number of fair-trade products widely available, and one or more of its larger institutions (such as a hospital or house of worship) should use mainly fair-trade products.

Frankly, I’m not sure how I feel about the Fair Trade Towns program. Does it really mean that much for a city to declare itself a fair-trade town? Fair-trade products have to undergo rigorous certification programs; I fear that using the same name for a municipality—which facilitates and encompasses so many different kinds of economic forces and transactions—waters down that rigor and could potentially cause confusion. (When I first heard the term, I imagined a city where everything—all products, contracts, etc.—were fair trade.)

I suppose it raises awareness of fair-trade principles, and that’s good, but I worry that the designation implies something more concrete than it really is, a vague statement of support with little to back it up.