Fair trade goes pragmatic

Sarah Scarborough says fair trade has to be commercial to make a difference. Picture / Geoff Dale

The new poster girl of New Zealand's fair trade advocates, Sarah Scarborough, comes across as an idealist.

The 30-year-old's interest in sustainable living has led her on adventures "from meeting spice growers in Costa Rica and Panama, to meeting coconut growers in Fiji" to founding a Fair Trade tea company in her twenties.

But home-brewed chai tea can take you only so far. Pragmatism is driving Scarborough and others beyond the traditional boundaries of the movement, to launch products aimed at forging a new path for fair trade in mainstream commerce.

"We are commercial - we have to be to sell enough to impact on people's lives," Scarborough said.

She is betting that the same consumer appetite that has seen fair trade goods taken under the wing of major US and British companies such as Wal-Mart, Tesco and Sainsbury's will drive similar growth to that seen internationally - about 50 per cent year-on-year - for fair trade products here.

To achieve that, Scarborough and her partners at the food marketing company Lighthouse Ventures - former Woolworths NZ chief executive Andrew Davidson, Bruce Patton, who helped establish the Progressive Enterprise house brand Signature Range, and former Saatchi & Saatchi NZ chief Mike Hutcheson - have launched a range of fair trade teas and coffees designed and priced to go head to head with "normal" brands on supermarket shelves.

They are getting a hot reception from retailers. Deals struck have seen the brand, Scarborough Fair, hit the shelves at Progressive Enterprises' Foodtown, Woolworths and Countdown supermarkets, Foodstuffs' New World chain, Coles Myer and Woolworths in Australia this month.

Scarborough Fair has plans to capture at least a 5 per cent slice of Australasia's $1.1 billion tea and coffee market. It could be a boost for a market still in the fledgling stages in this country. Steve Knapp, New Zealand co-ordinator of the Fair Trade Association of Australia and New Zealand, said average growth a quarter had been 45 per cent ... "we're following similar growth patterns to the UK and Europe".

Trade Aid, a handcrafts and fair trade products retailer, is the old timer of the local fair trade scene. Established in 1973 in Christchurch, it now has 30 stores across the country with annualised sales of $5 million.

Food manager Justin Purser said after a stagnant period in the 1990s sales were up. "There is a more general widespread exposure to globalisation issues that has been going on. Look at the Make Poverty History campaign ... people are more attuned to what's going on in the developing world." Trade Aid enjoyed an 18 per cent increase in sales in the 11 months to May 2005 on the same period the year before.

In Britain alone, sales of products with the Fairtrade mark, which reached an estimated retail value of 140 million in 2004, are doubling every two years.