Countdown to World Fair Trade Day: Safia Minney on making fashion 100% Fair Trade

Fairtrade fashion is enjoying a boom with everyone from M&S to emerging young designers using fairly traded threads. But there is still no single certification for a garment that’s fiartrade sourced and fairtrade manufactured. People Tree’s Safia Minney, in conjunction with the Fairtrade Foundation and IFAT (the global network of Fair Trade Organisations) are currently working towards that mark. In the first of our interviews in the run up to World Fair Trade Day on May 10, Minney explains why certifying Fair Trade fashion has proved so difficult.

New Consumer: How aware are the public now of what Fair Trade is?

Safia Minney: The public understand that it delivers a social impact to farmers and, in the broadest context, producers, but there’s still a lot of confusion in the context of clothing in terms of where exactly the Fair Trade impact is. With companies like M&S and Topshop working with Fairtrade certified and labelled cotton, [they are] offering a fantastic market for farmers - close to £20 million now.

But of course the manufacturing is not Fair Trade. This is where the consumer is quite rightly confused. We can see that the consumer would assume that the whole product was fairly traded on seeing the mark.

NC: Why is fashion different from food, when it comes to being able to certify it?

SM: Fashion is a more complex beast, because it’s a composite. If you look at chocolate and coffee, their packaging might change every two years, or the blend might change. Fair Trade Fashion and handicrafts come in incredibly challenging area when it comes to the fair trade environment because you have this very short life cycle of product compared to food. To offer a product that’s marketable and of good quality we have to give very, very expensive technical assistance to producers. The funding needs to reflect this.

Cotton is part of the product, and of course the manufacture is absolutely critical. Every shirt made on a machine is taking work away from nine weavers. This does matter.

NC: Why doesn’t that mark exist yet?

SM: It hasn’t happened because the Fairtrade MARK is a different economical model, it’s a deal for mainstream companies and conventional companies to bring a product to a market.

There have been millions put into Fairtrade MARKs for coffee, but we haven’t received a cent of funding for developing the model for clothing and we are the biggest Fair Trade fashion name in the world. It’s been done through ourselves and not taking holidays for 10 years.

All of the models of Fair Trade have been developed by the Fair Trade movement but there’s not much funding coming into these areas to develop and document these models.
Are Arcadia or M&S going to develop new projects that are about Fair Trade manufacturing using hand skills? Probably not, because there are no existing models.

NC: Why should we push for a Fair Trade certification for manufacture – aren’t companies already working towards ethical standards?

SM: It’s not enough for the certification to be an ethical mark, everyone should be doing that, and that’s about CSR. Making an ethical standard should be what every company is forced to do.

Fair Trade should be a certainty. The mission on which it was created is as a tool for development and sustainability, what I’m very looking forward to doing is working with the Fairtrade Foundation and IFAT on developing standards fopr best practice in manufacturing Fair Trade clothing.

NC: What would these standards be like?

SM: It might involve looking at whether the manufacturer in the developing world is an IFAT member (IFAT have their own set of standards), and then this will be very much based on a long term partnership. It might also look at more exacting models going forward for producer brands. Why might it not be possible to take the Divine Chocolate [whose company is 50% owned by the producers] and look at that as a goal and benchmark for these businesses?

These are some ideas that I would very much like to see evolve and develop, which I’d apply to the Fair Trade fashion supply chain, that will really mean production by the masses as opposed to mass production. We are setting up meetings at the moment to do this. We have to work with the pioneers within these specific areas, they don’t have any expertise for Fairtrade Fashion.

NC: Why is a Fair Trade fashion certification scheme important?

SM: The importance of developing these standards is huge, its critical, as fashion employs so many people in the developing world. I would hope that this would create lots of links for other producers.

With clothing there’s such a huge opportunity to improve lives, which after all is the whole point of Fair Trade. To not develop a thorough set of standards to wards achieving Fair Trade products and manufacture which goes way beyond what is currently out there, just doesn’t make sense.

NC: Until that certification becomes available, what can we do?

SM: There are IFAT members who are producing good fair trade fashion, people are buying more recycled and vintage, there are increasing options to buy fair trade fashion, so we should continue buying it.

Consumers are finding it more and more accessible, and large brands are also buying it (top shop etc). We need your type of readers, people who aren’t looking for easy solutions that would dilute the message.

Read Safia's column here at New Consumer