Vancouver becomes Fair Trade City

Vancouver has become the first major Canadian city to be certified for Fair Trade Town status.

That means it buys products such as coffee, tea, sugar and even soccer balls that have been made ethically and for which producers largely low-income farmers and labourers have been paid fairly.

In a largely symbolic gesture aimed at showing the city is leading by example, Vancouver council on Thursday voted to take the final step toward achieving Fair Trade Town status.

It did so by completing an application by Fair Trade Vancouver, a non-profit group, to have the city declared a fair-trade environment.

The city says it likely won't cost taxpayers any more to stock its meetings, cafeteria and offices "where possible and practicable" with fair trade items. That's because since 2005, Vancouver has had an ethical purchasing policy that does largely the same thing.

But council hopes the Fair Trade Town designation will give a solid boost to the growing consumer movement toward buying goods from cooperatives and countries that agree to pay living wages to those who produce them.

"It means you are committed to a path of progress on your purchasing decisions," said Coun. Andrea Reimer.

"I don't think I've ever had a taxpayer tell me they want me to use their taxes to drive down labour standards and environmental protection in other countries."

Advocates of fair trade said Vancouver's decision will help convince the general public that buying products that cut out the middleman and deliver more profits to poor farmer workers is increasingly the right way to go.

And they point to an increasing array of price-competitive fair trade goods that have made their way into everyday use.

In Metro Vancouver, a surprisingly large variety of goods are now available under the fair trade label, including coffees, spices, vegetables, rice, fruit, flowers, wine and those Pakistani-made soccer balls.

"I was in Save-On-Foods the other day and I found fair trade vanilla beans of all things," said Lloyd Bernhardt, president of Ethical Bean Coffee, one of a growing number of specialty coffee producers in the Lower Mainland.

If there wasn't that kind of demand, a large retail supermarket like Save-On wouldn't stock the product, he said.

The non-profit fair trade movement in Canada is less than 20 years old. A paltry 22,000 kilograms of fair trade-labelled coffee was first imported into Canada in 1998. But by 2008, that had grown to more than five million kilograms and now many specialty coffee shops proudly brag that their products are grown on fair-wage plantations.

In the intervening years, Transfair Canada, the Canadian arm of Fairtrade Labelling Organizations International (FLO), the not-for-profit worldwide certification organization, has added 11 categories. In 2007, wine and cosmetics became the newest products to be imported.