What are the origins of Fair Trade?

What are the origins of Fair Trade?

Sam Bills (Manager) gives expert video advice on: How did the Fair Trade movement get started?; How is the Fair Trade movement different now from its inception? and more...

The name Fair Trade is fairly new, as it has only been used now for around 20 to 25 years, but the impulse is something that has been going on for a long time. In its current form, it comes out of the post-World War Two where there were a lot of organizations that began to work with refugee communities, and these kinds of groups of less developed countries, and began to bring products in from those countries and sell it. That is where it first pops up, at least in a modern form. These alternative trade organizations were just doing in essence a different kind of trade. This was eveident mostly after World War Two, and that is probably the first occurence of that method.