No-nonsense Guide to Fair Trade by David Ransom was a helpful book that I read in the run-up to some lessons in local secondary schools on the topic of fair-trade. It takes a number of different areas, e.g. jeans and looks at how fair-trade makes a difference. This book contains a lot of information, and is generally well thought through.
My slight frustration would be that at times it seems very idealised in the way it describes the tension of fair-trade and free trade, calling conventional trade a “beast” and seeing conventional trade as a creation of a global conspiracy between “politicians, transnational corporate empires and corrupt individuals in poor countries” with the purpose to “gain a political stronghold”. Whilst it is true that many people have abused power and rules to keep them in their own position and to widen the poverty gap, sometimes I find that fair-trade as a movement spend too much time trying to make the politicians and senior managers of multi-national companies feel personally guilty for the injustice, when actually it is really about changing the buy habits of millions of people, and that in turn will change the habits of multi-national companies.
