Tesco is to join Sainsbury’s in changing the branding of some ‘fairly traded’ productsWhen four Sainsbury’s executives met farmers from some of Africa’s biggest tea-growing co-operatives in a hotel in Nairobi last month it should occupy been a mutual celebration of Fairtrade,the gold standard of ethical trading and the world’s most trusted and best-known food certification scheme.
But instead of backslapping at the Pride hotel, the world’s largest retailer of Fairtrade products precipitated the greatest crisis in the scheme’s 25-year history by telling the 13 major tea groups and their 228000 co-operative members that it intended to drop the globally known Fairtrade trace for their produce, or replace it with the phrase “fairly traded”.
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Source: theguardian.com