Born of Ideals, Trapped by the Market: Fairtrade Certification Inside and Out

Happily idle, friends far and wide, settled and content — still, in fact, looking for land…

Q = Da Chunfeng  A = Joya

A: I did my postgraduate studies at a French agricultural engineering school, where one of my lecturers happened to be the chair of Fairtrade France. That is how I came across the Fairtrade philosophy. After I graduated, I wanted to join a Fairtrade organisation, but no suitable vacancies were available. It was not until I had been working back in China for a year and a half that Fairtrade International advertised a role in China, and I applied.

Q: What exactly did your job involve?

A: When I started in 2013, China had thirteen agricultural cooperatives that had already obtained Fairtrade certification, with a few more still in the pipeline. Up to that point, European colleagues had been flying into China to help these cooperatives obtain certification. As the demand for certification grew, the organisation needed a resident representative in China — which is why I took the job.

My first task was to help farmers obtain certification. But the people who came seeking certification were usually not farmers; they were import–export trading companies. It was typically the companies that wanted Fairtrade certification, so they wanted the farmers they worked with to join the supply chain.

My role was to visit the villages first to understand the situation, introduce the villagers to what Fairtrade is and what is required for certification, and then help them prepare the paperwork.

For farmers and agricultural cooperatives in the process of obtaining certification or who had already been certified, I helped them resolve issues and pass the audits. Fairtrade audit standards are extremely detailed, with hundreds of specific criteria. The assessment begins right after the application is submitted, and farmers or cooperatives have two to three years to meet the standards step by step. Even after certification is granted, ongoing audits continue. My job was to help them meet each checkpoint along the way. This involved a great deal of organisational communication — between farmers, and between cooperatives.

At the time, I also set up a Fairtrade tea mutual-aid group in China and held regular training sessions for tea farmers and cooperatives. If a cooperative felt it needed technical training, I would invite relevant experts to run workshops for everyone.

The other major part of my role was international market connections. When overseas buyers wanted to source Fairtrade products from China, I would take import–export traders to visit the farmers. I also attended agricultural trade fairs both in China and abroad with the farmers to explore new markets.

Q: You mentioned that Fairtrade certification has a system of standards. Can those standards be adapted to the realities of Chinese agriculture?

A: The standards cover three broad areas:

First, defining what constitutes a smallholder farmer in terms of cultivated area and economic income.

Second, requirements for specific production methods — an emphasis on environmental protection and minimising the use of chemical fertilisers and pesticides.

Third, requirements for the organisation and management of local cooperative structures.

Because there is enormous variation from one part of the world to another, applying a single set of standards universally is, most of the time, extremely difficult. The number of Chinese farming households and cooperatives that have entered the Fairtrade system is still small, and they joined later than those in other Asia-Pacific countries, so the attention my work in China received was not particularly high.

Moreover, the image of Chinese farmers internationally does not match the typical profile of those Fairtrade focuses on — they are not the impoverished, in-need communities seen in South America, Africa or India. I frequently fed back to my overseas colleagues that Chinese farmers are not like that.

From a practical, on-the-ground perspective, many aspects of Fairtrade standards do not sit comfortably with China’s conditions. For instance, there is a chapter in the operational handbook titled “Fairness and Democracy”, which is a principle Fairtrade places great emphasis on. The standards require that decisions be made collectively through group meetings and voting, and many farmers are simply not accustomed to this form of decision-making.

On the principle of democracy, we hoped at the time that the involvement of retailers or import-export trading companies with farmers would be kept to an absolute minimum. But in China the opposite was true: the cooperatives coming forward for Fairtrade certification were almost invariably led by trading companies. These traders were not only deeply involved in the certification process — they also appeared on the cooperatives’ own member lists, something almost unheard of in other countries. Companies held a monopolistic position in the cooperatives’ decision-making, and the cooperatives often had no choice but to sell their certified produce to that single company.

Women and children are also a sensitive issue. Under the operational guidelines, when we visit farming households we are not supposed to photograph children casually; we must obtain consent in advance. But in China, it is perfectly normal during the busy season for children to help their families with farm work. So when external auditors came to conduct inspections, we would advise the farmers to try to keep the children away, because some auditors, unfamiliar with the local culture, would apply a European mindset and conclude that the children were being exploited.

We could understand the intent behind such provisions — for example, in certain banana plantations there genuinely is a severe problem of child labour exploitation, so standards on child protection are hard to relax. And the variation between countries and regions is so vast that it is simply not feasible to draft bespoke clauses for every location. My colleagues in China did report local circumstances back to the international body, but I never saw any concrete adjustments made.

Q: Compared with the situation in China, how is Fairtrade working in other countries?

A: The team I was part of mainly covered the Asia-Pacific region, and I could see that India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia and Thailand all had a relatively high level of acceptance of Fairtrade. This may be down to historical reasons — for example, many Indians can speak English and their mindset is comparatively Westernised, so requirements such as “democratic cooperation” are more readily embraced.

On top of that, even when faced with the same standards, farmers in these regions are able to give feedback more directly. The personalities of the Chinese and Indian farmers I encountered were often strikingly different. In India, farmers would speak their minds immediately, whereas Chinese farmers tend to be more reserved and observant — they would not offer a commentary right away and were comparatively reluctant in the practice of “democratic cooperation”.

Sometimes farmers were asked to give media interviews and share their own stories. Farmers in the countries I mentioned have a voice and a sense of agency when it comes to shaping cooperative standards; they have had a degree of education, can express themselves in English, and carry a confidence in doing so.

Q: Why did you eventually leave the job? Did the experience leave you with any reflections?

A: I always believed that the Fairtrade philosophy could help farmers establish a virtuous cycle. As the saying goes, “Better to teach someone to fish than to give them a fish” — rather than handing farmers material aid, it is better to help them understand how to solve their own problems. For example, I would suggest that once farmers start earning, they should not focus solely on the immediate distribution of profits but also invest in upgrading production conditions and in long-term local public infrastructure — things like roads, schools and healthcare — so that development can be more sustainable.

But once I started working in the job, I gradually began to see that the Fairtrade system is riddled with contradictions.

First, the certification standards were drawn up by Westerners and do not sit particularly well with the needs of every region. Second, the whole foundation is market-driven — the logic of big fish swallowing small fish. There is no real substantive fairness; only a veneer of formal fairness on a certain level.

Fairtrade was originally conceived as a way to drive the flow of resources, ensure that farmers could enter the market with guaranteed fair prices, and organise them to participate in large producer–consumer trade fairs, cross-border exchange and mutual support among similar producers, production-technique training, and so on.

Yet I could not help feeling that it was a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Whether our colleagues or the management, everyone set out with a sense of fairness and justice, but the force of capital markets is simply too overwhelming. We were all swept up in the current, powerless to resist. This is inequality born of capital-driven trade. As long as there is trade — whether it is “fair” or “unfair” — it deepens that inequality.

Within the organisation, the supposedly democratic decision-making process has in some cases been co-opted by capital. For instance, in China, the member lists of certain cooperatives include local officials and traders, who can heavily sway decisions through the norms of a relationship-driven society. In Fairtrade organisations in South America, cooperatives composed of local smallholders often find themselves unable to achieve equal footing with agricultural associations formed by large farm owners — and behind those farms are major agribusinesses and investors from developed countries.

Around the time I left, there was a great deal of restructuring within the organisation. People kept leaving, one after another, including my former mentor, the former chair of Fairtrade France. The original purpose of Fairtrade was to give producers more power, but the paradox is that producer organisations began jostling for power and influence within the institution itself. At the International Fairtrade Congress, representatives from different countries competed to secure a greater voice in the organisation’s internal affairs, rather than the empathy and solidarity one might have hoped for. That left me feeling rather disillusioned.

Many of the staff working in marketing roles inside the organisation earned far more than I did. They had previously done marketing at large multinationals such as Nestlé and Carrefour, and were accustomed to the way capital operates. Even after moving to an organisation that champions humanitarian principles, they could not entirely shed their old habits. When I worked alongside them, we often disagreed on approach.

When I went to meet farmers in my capacity as a staff member, I felt a deep sense of injustice: farmers work their fingers to the bone, with no weekend rest and no notion of a thirty-five-hour working week, yet they earn the least of everyone. And the organisation’s staff put on suits and ties, fly international flights to every corner of the globe, stay in rather nice hotels, and tour the world giving talks that say: the farmers in this country or that country are terribly poor and need our help.

Because I had received a certain education and had access to all kinds of social resources, the gap between my salary and theirs was so vast — and it was not as though I deserved it more. This feeling grew especially strong when I actually sat down with the farming households. They would warmly pull out the very best things in their home to welcome you, even though their own standard of living was far from high. That gap made me feel hypocritical, and I could not carry on.

Q: Beyond Fairtrade, do you think there is a better model for connecting production and sales?

A: In the early days of Fairtrade, roughly from the 1960s until around the year 2000, some farmers genuinely benefited from it. But once globalisation took hold, Fairtrade began mimicking the methods of capital — the exploitation is simply less severe, less brazen. Moreover, no matter how well-intentioned a model may be in principle, applying a single standard across every region in the world inevitably creates its own unfairness.

Personally, I now favour localised production-to-consumer channels — the smaller the region the better, avoiding cross-border and cross-state trade. When the distance is too great, even if consumers buy with the best of intentions, they can never truly know what is happening at the other end of the chain. The original intent behind Fairtrade was also to cut out intermediaries, but a shorter supply chain, with less distance between consumer and producer, means less estrangement.

China should start from its own realities and imagine what production and distribution models are possible. Domestic consumers’ purchasing power is growing, and a new kind of values-driven consumer is slowly emerging — people who are conscious of their own consumption choices.

At the same time, more and more young people are returning to the countryside and to farming. This mirrors what I have seen in France in recent years: people who were once doctors, nurses or lawyers choosing to retrain as farmers, shifting from consumers to producers.

Admittedly, selling the products will be difficult at first, but I believe that these small-batch, principled goods will find ever-greater acceptance in the market. Many young people are willing to buy directly from nearby smallholder farmers. Some school canteens are happy to serve organic meals to their students, or source all their ingredients from local farms.

Consumption and production are not really a binary relationship. Rather than championing a specific model like “Fairtrade”, I would prefer to return to trust between people and to morally grounded exchange rooted in a sustainable way of life.

I still hold a small measure of hope. If current patterns of consumption become absurd enough, some people will want to return to a more fundamental way of living. The pandemic, for instance, suddenly severed the connections of modern life and made people realise that the existence enabled by sophisticated digital platforms could one day cease to function. When that day comes, will people choose to return to a simpler life and support alternative forms of consumption?

All images provided by the interviewee.

Interview and text: Da Chunfeng

Edited by: Wang Hao