Fair trade (disambiguation) - Definition and Overview

Fair trade has a variety of meanings:

• Fair trade is a term used by social justice, peace movement, ecology movement, and green movement groups, to contrast with 'unfair' international trade practices, and sometimes, to contrast with free trade as promoted by the World Trade Organization and NAFTA.

• Fairtrade labelling or Fairtrade certification is a movement to allow consumers to identify goods (especially commodities such as coffee) that meet certain agreed standards of fairness.

• "Fair trade" is more rarely used to refer to corporate governance and reforming anti-competitive trade principles (such as antitrust issues). Sometimes (in Korea and Japan, for example) these issues are pursued by organisations that are called Fair Trade/Trading Commissions.

• "Fair trade" can also refer to consumer rights and fair contracts. Office of Fair Trading is a common name for an organisation that aims to protect these interests and/or to facilitate a fair and ethical marketplace. Governmental and non-governmental organisations with this name exist, for example, in the United Kingdom and Australia.

• In United States history, "Fair trade" can refer to laws in place starting in the 1930s and continuing until the 1970s. Those laws, first formalized nationally in the Miller-Tydings Act of 1937, protected independent retailers from the price-cutting competition of large chain stores by permitting manufacturers to specify the minimum retail price of a product. Federal laws requiring this form of fair trade were all repealed by 1975.