Cocoa bean pods
We may not be buying 'It bags', or catwalk-inspired clothes, let alone gas-guzzling 4x4s. But happily, there is still a way to fulfil our shopping urges – with a feelgood factor as the only gift with purchase.
During Fairtrade Fortnight this year — from February 23 to March 8 — the Fairtrade Foundation will be celebrating its 15th birthday. Fifteen years in which the sales of Fairtrade-certified products have risen to £493 million — almost half a billion quid. In 2006-2007 alone, Fairtrade coffee sales rose to £117 million. Fairtrade wine sales (yes, you now can enjoy a guilt-free glass of Merlot with your dinner) went up by 47%, and more and more of us are now saying it with Fairtrade flowers: a 71% surge, year-on-year.
More than most people, perhaps, I know what those figures really mean. The change in the quality of life to the producers – who've benefited from the way in which the British, in particular, have embraced the idea that by making a savvier choice while throwing store cupboard essentials in our shopping trolley, we can actually influence the way people on the other side of the world live.
In 1994, Green & Black's Maya Gold – from Green & Black's, the company I founded three years before with my wholefood pioneer husband Craig Sams – became the first product to carry the Fairtrade mark, certifying our claim that we paid a fairer price to our cocoa growers. Since then, we've seen with our own eyes how an entire community – in the Maya mountains of Belize, in Central America – has been transformed.
When we started buying cacao from these impoverished farmers, only 10% of children in the villages went on to secondary education. Now it's over 70%. Today, the mud floors of many of the villagers' houses have been replaced by concrete: easier to keep clean, but also healthier, enabling food and clothing to be kept dry during the rainy season. When the women take their cacao to market, often the first thing they do with the money is buy sardines: essential fatty acids don't feature heavily in the Mayan diet. When members of the family do fall ill, they can now afford to pay the small amounts charged for subsidised medicines and doctors' appointments, which previously were beyond them. In other words, a win-win. You get a chocolate bar. They get a new and better way of living. It's really that simple.
Just over 15 years ago, when (for some bizarre and forgotten reason) I lay on my bed watching Oracle on my telly – remember it's what we did, before Google, to find stuff out? – I could never have imagined that a chocolate could change anyone's life. (Waistline, maybe. But life…?) A page of text flashed (or more accurately lumbered) on to the screen, explaining about the Fairtrade Foundation, and how they were searching for a product on which to put their mark. It had to pay a fairer price direct to farmers and their co-operatives, child labour was prohibited, and there was only a shortlist of pesticides that could be used (we instantly ticked that box, being organic). I scribbled down the contact number.
By coincidence, a couple of days later, my husband Craig bumped into Mike Drury – the Fairtrade Foundation's first director – and rapidly established that our new Belizean cacao project might be just the ticket. As organic cocoa wasn't available via the commodity market, we had always dealt direct with farmers' co-operatives, giving them five-year rolling contracts (for our security, as well as theirs), and already paid a higher price as an organic premium. With a launch looming in Sainsbury's for our orange-and-spice-flavoured chocolate, the Fairtrade Foundation's inspectors flew to Belize, inspected the books and talked to the farmer members of the Toledo Cacao Growers Association (TCGA), and satisfied themselves that Maya Gold was an ideal product to launch the brand new Fairtrade Mark.
What happened next confirmed my belief that when you're trying to do good, it's as if unseen forces try to help. 
The launch coincided with a Run for Fair Trade event by the Young Methodists, who were running through towns carrying flaming torches, buttonholing supermarket managers to persuade them to stock Fairtrade products. Because of the close links between the church and the Third World – something we'd never really given much thought to – I ended up fielding a call one afternoon from a Tesco buyer (who'd been reluctant to stock the product): "What's this chocolate all these vicars keep calling me about...?" And on the day of launch, we had eight minutes of BBC news coverage, which resulted in me getting pathetically emotional at the sight of our distinctive orange packaging flashed on screen behind Michael Buerk's head.
The idea – that by paying a relatively teensy retail premium you could make an exponentially bigger difference to the farmers' income – captured the public's imagination. The cocoa that goes into a bar of Fairtrade-marked chocolate, for instance, may cost between 1 to 2p more than a non-Fairtrade product.
Today there are internationally agreed Fairtrade criteria for dozens of different categories of product, not only coffee, tea, cocoa and chocolate, but also mangoes, muesli bars, rice, quinoa, herbs and spices, biscuits, honey, jams, cotton wool, sports balls, cosmetics, ice cream, yoghurt – and even a Palestinian olive oil carrying the Fairtrade mark, due to appear on shelves this year, assuming that they can ship it.
There are some staggering success stories. One in four bananas sold in the UK is now Fairtrade; Tate & Lyle has pledged that all its cane sugar range in the shops will be Fairtrade by 2010; by the end of this year, Starbucks promises that all its espresso-based coffees — including the lattes and cappuccinos — will be Fairtrade-certified, making them the largest purchaser of certified coffee in the world (£40 million worth this year). Sainsbury's has switched 95% of its own label tea to Fairtrade. I can even get a Fairtrade cuppa on the train from Hastings to Charing Cross.
It's not enough, however, to stick a Fairtrade mark on any product, sit back and wait for it to be a hit. It's a simple fact that however philanthropically-minded we are, the Fairtrade option has to taste as good as its commercial rival – if it doesn't delight the tastebuds we won't be back for more.
Some 320 towns in the UK have now declared themselves "Fairtrade zones", with another 300 working towards it. And the real bottom line? More than 7.5 million people – farmers, workers and their families – now have more security and control over their lives.
I'd never really given much thought, pre-Maya Gold, to the fact that such security is almost unknown for so many Third World farmers, prey to the buying power of international traders who constantly seek to drive the price of commodities down.
The Mayan farmers who belonged to the TCGA, for instance, were encouraged to grow cacao by well-meaning aid workers. The aid project ended (as they usually do), and after just three harvests the price offered for their cocoa tumbled to 50 cents per pound. For most farmers, it wasn't even worth harvesting their carefully nurtured crop. Not surprisingly, it took several years before they really believed what we promised: that Green & Black's would buy everything they grew, and that the guaranteed Fairtrade price wouldn't one day be drastically cut. It's not all been plain sailing though. Hurricane Iris wiped out most of the harvest and felled thousands of trees in 2001. A Fairtrade mark may help buffer against poverty but, alas, not 100mph winds.
Not long ago, I asked Cayetano Ico – then head of the TCGA that supplies the beans for Maya Gold – if he had a message for Green & Black's lovers. "Just tell them," he said, "that every time they buy a bar of chocolate, they're sending a child to school".
As Fairtrade Foundation's executive director Harriet Lamb says, "It's the public who've got Fairtrade where it is. And now we're seeing a whole new generation of consumer behaviour coming through, where Fairtrade is going from being a nice ethical option to being the must-have and the must-do."
Retail cynics may insist that in a recession they will look after number one by seeking to shave a penny here or a penny there off what we spend on our family's groceries. But whatever the doomsayers might like to have us think, new shopping isn't just about value – it's about values. And for the people of the Third World who can look forward to a brighter future, thanks to Fairtrade, we all have to hope that buying Fairtrade marked products – whenever and wherever we can – is a habit that we won't give up in a hurry.
And really, when it comes to feelgood shopping, which would you rather have? A handbag with a 'designer premium' of several hundred quid (so 2008, darling), or a cup of coffee or tea, or a bar of chocolate, which gives you the warm, rosy glow of knowing that the farmer who grew it for you can now buy schoolbooks for his children? Of course, it's not exactly either/or. But what the Fairtrade Foundation has so successfully done is make us think about the impact of our shopping choices.
So Happy Birthday, Fairtrade mark — and let's toast you not with champagne, but with a glass of Traidcraft's South African, Fairtrade-certified, eminently-quaffable Goue Vallei sparkling white wine.
For more details on Fairtrade policy and products visit www.fairtrade.org.uk. Sweet Dreams: The Story of Green & Black's, by Craig Sams and Josephine Fairley, is published by Random House, at £14.99. Available post-free for £12.99 through Saga Books, on page 183 of the March 2009 edition of Saga Magazine