London Fairtrade Capital: The world's largest Fairtrade city.

2010’s Ben & Jerry’s Sundae music festival was a sun-soaked, Fairtrade goodies filled event on Clapham Common, celebrating great music and Ben & Jerry’s commitment to going 100% Fairtrade by the end of 2011. Sundae punters went Nuts About Fairtrade, filling up their tummies with the bottomless supply of Fairtrade Ben & Jerry’s ice cream and the following Fairtrade nosh from the Tasting Tent:

• Traidcraft muesli
• Dorset Cereal’s Grenola boxes
• Harry’s peanuts
• Equal Exchange’s brazil nuts and walnuts
• Sainsbury’s fruit bars by Tropical Wholefoods
• Divine chocolate coins and bars (all the flavours!)
• Jelly beans
• Cafedirect coffee samples
• Fairtrade wines
• Lots and lots of chocolate coated raisins and nuts

The Fairtrade Merchandise stall was manned by the Fairtrade Wandsworth Network and punters could buy cotton bags, tea towel, inflatable bananas, badges.

2,500 people showed their interest in Fairtrade/products by signing up to receive Fair Comment – 10% of the total number of Sundae Festival goers!

Sexy models bore their torsos modelling the ‘pants for poverty’, Fairtrade cotton underwear, and the following celebrities endorsed Fairtrade through wearing the FAIRTRADE Mark T-shirt (including some whilst performing!):

• Scouting For Girls
• Billy Brag
• Idlewild
• Slow Club
• Goldheart Assembly
• Frightened Rabbit
• Cherry Ghost

For further coverage of the event, click here  or read this blog.

London is the world’s largest Fairtrade city and if you’d like to get involved in the exciting London Fairtrade Campaign, please contact volunteer.london@fairtrade.org.uk.

Last Wednesday we attended the launch of Cadbury’s Fairtrade Fortnight campaign at the Gold Coast Bar and Restaurant in Brixton. The event was an opportunity for an update on the impact of Cadbury Dairy Milk achieving Fairtrade status last year. After a vote of thanks from the Deputy High Commissioner for Ghana, Her Excellency Mrs Elizabeth Nicol, Alison Ward, Global CSR Director for Cadbury, gave us an update.

Since Dairy Milk bars went Fairtrade in the UK and Ireland in July 2009, consumers in Australia, Canada and Japan have had the opportunity to support Fairtrade. In total a whopping 350 million Dairy Milk bars will carry the Fairtrade mark around the world. The range of products is expanding to include Buttons and, by the end of 2010, the entire hot beverages range in the UK and Ireland. The move has quadrupled the amount of Fairtrade cocoa coming out of Ghana compared with 2008, and will benefit more than 40,000 farmers.

Harriet Lamb, Executive Director of the Fairtrade Foundation, then talked more about Fairtrade in Ghana, managing to quote both Michael Jackson and Barack Obama in the first minute. Describing her experiences of visiting Ghana and seeing Fairtrade in action over the years, she reminded us that in addition to cocoa, other Fairtrade products such as pineapples and shea nuts were being exported from Ghana. She also mentioned that the Fairtrade Foundation were continuing to explore how to certify gold.

After a robust question and answer session, the team at Cadbury unveiled their latest ad campaign.

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This year Cadbury is supporting the Big Swap with a free compilation of musical swapping. The CD has an exclusive collaboration with Paolo Nutini and the Big Ghana Band, the track by Zingolo featured in the last ad and five covers by the Big Ghana Band of pop classics including “You Spin Me Round” and “Sound of the Underground”. Since we picked up a copy at the launch, the CD has hardly been off the Fairtrade London sound system. Hearing really is believing – so much joy in one small disc!

To get your hands on a copy of Big Swap Songs, buy any Fairtrade product during Fairtrade Fortnight, and visit the Glass and a Half Productions website.

Most of the negative comments here seem to come from people who know very little about the Fairtrade certification system. Thus we have elementary misunderstandings such as the Fairtrade Foundation shouldn’t endorse/validate Nestle. The certifier is FLO, and only products are certified, not companies: there is a big difference. Many companies have only 1 or 2 Fairtrade products.

If a product totally complies with the certification requirements, it would be wrong not to certify it; it does not indicate endorsement of the whole company. Personally I prefer not to buy Nestle products but Kit Kat is the UK’s most popular chocolate biscuit product; millions are sold all the time. Is it not a good thing that these, which would be sold anyway, are now to be Fairtrade? There is something egocentric and parochial about relating everything to one’s own buying habits instead of considering the wider picture.

The big picture is that babies in the developing world are dying in their thousands all the time for numerous reasons, of which poverty is the main one. We need to address this in various ways, and economic development via trade is essential. As much as possible of that trade should be fair. Who is to say that, albeit slowly, most large companies won’t start to have Fairtrade products – and then more Fairtrade products. In my view this is starting and I don’t criticise companies for moving in the right direction.

Jeannette’s comments first appeared on the Fairtrade Foundation site – you can read further comments here.

The full press release on Kit-Kat bars going Fairtrade is here.