Fairtrade history in the Netherlands

Yesterday I visited a little piece of Fairtrade history: while visiting my parents in Leiden, we visited the Wereld Winkel, literally "world shop". Wereld Winkel was the world's first ever Fairtrade shop, founded in the Netherlands in 1969 and now has 250 branches across the country. The focus was upon fairly traded handicrafts that give people the chance to use traditional skills to create products for the Western market. However, this was relatively limited in its impact at first, since a lot of learning was required on both sides to predict what people wanted to buy (with variable strands in fashion) and to achieve the quality that consumers desired in return for the slightly higher price. 

Max Havelaar, the first Fairtrade mark

York is home to a groundbreaking Fairtrade shop too: Shared Earth was founded in York as one of the first UK retailers to follow in the footsteps of Wereld Winkel in 1986, with a similar range of wares: predominantly craft items and clothing.

One major change in buying habits over the last 45 years was the move towards Fairtrade food as well as crafts: firstly long-life products like tea, coffee and chocolate and then more recently perishable items like bananas. Initially, fairly traded tea and coffee were only available in ethical shops like the Wereld Winkel or via stalls like the one I set up at my church aged 17, because there was otherwise no way for consumers to tell whether food sold in supermarkets or elsewhere was fairly traded. 

The next major innovation was also Dutch: "Max Havelaar" was the first ever Fairtrade label, launched in 1988, selling coffee from Mexico. This was initiated by a sharp descent in world coffee prices which meant there was now a serious risk that coffee farmers could be paid less than the coffee actually cost to produce. The name "Max Havelaar" came from a fictional Dutch character who opposed the exploitation of coffee pickers in Dutch colonies (a book published in 1859).  

The new Dutch Fairtrade logo still includes
Max Havelaar!

The new label offered mainstream coffee industry players the opportunity to adopt a standardized system of Fair Trade criteria, and allowed consumers to be confident that products met stringent conditions to ensure justice for poor farmers. The Max Havelaar initiative proved so successful that the UK Fairtrade Foundation was founded in 1992 by a group of charities including Traidcraft, Christian Aid and Oxfam.

The Fairtrade logo has gone through several different designs but is now internationally recognised and widely available in mainstream shops. I was interested to find this week that in the Netherlands, the Fairtrade logo still includes "Max Havelaar" beneath!

The effect has been dramatic: while in 1992 the vast majority of fairly traded products (80%) were handicrafts, last year 80% of a much larger market of Fairtrade products were food items and only one in five were craft items.

UPDATE: York will be hosting the Fairtrade Yorkshire Regional Conference on 19th Septh - book here today to hear stories of how the world's first Fairtrade Region (Yorkshire) continues to pioneer today! http://www.fairtradeyork.com/regional-fairtrade-conference-comes-to-york/  

See also

• How Fairtrade helps build essential infrastructure
• The need for a new economics
• Is it time for the "un-Fairtrade" logo?