Fair Trade Managerial Practices: Strategy, Organisation and Engagement

Candidate Number: 647691

Title Journal Article Topic:  Fair Trade Managerial Practices: Strategy, Organisation and Engagement

Group Number: P1

The Group Topic: Fair Trade and the Food Industry.

       This article explains the definition of Fair Trade organization, the perspectives about Fair Trade and different points related to Fair Trade distribution. It shows how companies can be motivated to distribute its products as Fair Trade products, how distribution of Fair Trade products can be organized by companies and estimating the pursuit of distributors to use the Fair Trade principles as well as illustrating what Fair Trade contributes on, the three main characteristics of Fair Trade. Basically this research depends on five different studies in Switzerland to know and understand different strategies and administrative experiences.

        Firstly, Fair Trade organization is trading partnership which must be included discussion, limpidity and respect. Fair trade participates in affording better trade condition and keeping the rights of disadvantaged producers in the safe side especially in the South. The three main characteristics of Fair Trade are producers who are not given opportunities to build themselves in the market, organizations which are trying to increase and develop fair trade and consumers who decide how much quantity should be sold and producers who have the capability to be a part of Fair Trade market. There are three objectives related to Fair Trade. Two of them based on Fair Trade distribution which are how companies can be motivated to distribute its products and how distribution of fair trade products can be organized by companies. These objectives are important because they are not interested only in the existing of Fair Trade but also for firms which decided to distribute fair trade products based on their success. The last objective based on Fair Trade perspective and it is the estimate of participation of distributors with fair trade values. In other word, it means that are distributors still using fair trade values in their transactions or not?

        According to (Raynolds, 2000; Renard, 2003) fair trade has been explained by two different perspectives. On one hand, it is an expansion of traditional trade in a simple way involving more principles and regulation. On the other hand, it can be used to improve the usual way for traditional trade. These two perspectives are represented by two different types of distributions. The first one is more realistic, using major channels for increasing the targeted consumers and in the same time to open market access for producers. The second one is more speculative, it based on the using of alternative channels which are basically related to Fair Trade. There is one important difference between these two perspectives. In the first one, labelling must be used to specialize the Fair Trade products from the conventional one. In contrast, all of products are derived from fair trade in the second perspective.