Thriving in a Hostile Environment: Fair Trade's Role as a Positive Market Mechanism for Disadvantaged Producers

Consumers clearly like Fairtrade. Sales of Fairtrade products in Europe, North America, and Japan have grown exponentially in recent years; Fairtrade bananas have a 50 per cent market share in Switzerland (AgroFair, 2004), and global sales of all Fairtrade products amounted to approximately £500m in 2003 (Vidal, 2004) up from an estimated £335m in 2002 (Leatherhead Food International, 2003). Fairtrade coffee is the fastest-growing segment of the speciality coffee industry in the US and UK (McCarthy, 2004). The UK market in 2004 was worth about £130m. To date, these figures include the initially small, but rapidly growing, US market. If US market development follows the pattern of European markets – and there is evidence to believe that it may be moving even faster – global sales of Fairtrade will increase by a factor of 10-15 in the next few years. Therefore, it is far from fanciful to assume that global Fairtrade sales will top £1b by 2007 (Demetriou, 2003).