For those of you doing research on Fair Trade (and for those of you who are just plain Fair Trade geeks), we are pleased to announce the world’s first textbook on Fair Trade, Fair Trade: Market-Driven Ethical Consumption has gone into its second printing.
The book includes chapters on the Economics of Fair Trade, Financing Fair Trade, Supply Chain Ethics, the history and workings of certification, and the Marketing of Fair Trade.
Of particular interest is the authors’ consideration of the challenges now facing this sector:
- how to protect the integrity of Fair Trade;
- how Fair Trade can scale up to meet demand globally;
- how Fair Trade can help to change the values and practices of international trade as a whole;
- how Fair Trade can best position itself as the ‘gold standard’ among corporate social responsibility initiatives.
Case studies and data analysis support the arguments throughout. The authors summarize a wide range of impact assessments of Fair Trade on producer groups, and evaluate various methodologies for measuring the non-economic benefits to producers which might be left out of traditional return-on-investment calculations.
The authors argue that Fair Trade is a market driven phenomenon which corrects market failures for small produces in developing countries. It is both economically robust and fairer, and responds to consumer choice.
The book is available through Amazon.com:
and the Sage publications website, www.sagepub.com/booksProdDesc.nav?prodId=Book226691.
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