Despite the fact that I carried my laptop with me everywhere like a shield, I still sorta sucked with the note-taking at the Equal Exchange summit.

For ex: We split into 3 groups for the discussion part of the workshop, “Volume: Enter the Giants — Volume, Values, & Viability.” While I’m proud to say that I wrote down the topic of my section — The Role of Corporations (more specifically, publicly traded companies) – I didn’t do the same for the other two groups.

I’m pretty sure they each answered one of these two Qs: “How much volume is enough?” and “What kind of fair trade volume has the most value to the movement?” But I’m not sure… Can someone help me out here? Julia? Rodney? Jordan?

In any case, in my group, we were discussing big corps, and our end goal was to finish this sentence: “Fair trade success means …”

Before I go into the discussion, lemme set the scene a lil bit. Everyone invited to this summit was someone with a serious commitment to fair trade. I mean, while I’d like to think of myself as committed, the FOUNDERS of the fair trade movement were there.

Most of these people live and breathe fair trade – It’s both their passion and their livelihood. There were 30-some of us in a circle in a classroom for this discussion, and this lil crowd included Tom Bullock, chairman of the board at TransFair, a buncha people from Equal Exchange, Noel Oettle of the Environmental Monitoring Group in South Africa, and other diehard fair trade activists.

And me.

What was a lil surprising to me was that there was pretty much a consensus that big corps DO have a role to play in fair trade. In fact, at one point, someone posed the question: How many people are happy that Starbucks is in fair trade? Lots of hands went up.

The main issue that most concurred was an issue was this: “What control do we have over what fair trade is?”

With the publicly traded Green Mountain and Starbucks alone already making up close to 40% of the fair trade market, the issue of who defines fair trade is a hugely relevant and hugely contentious one. At least one person named the fear that the big players – with their money and influence — will take over the FT market to the point it puts Equal Exchange out of a role.

I don’t think that’ll happen – as long as fair trade committed peeps act now to ensure that fair trade standards remain strong.

I spoke up once during this discussion, to say that I agree that fair trade standards need to be set by those who’re committed to fair trade. I also said that I continue to feel a sense of inability on the part of those who’re 100% fair trade committed to shape the criteria and direction that fair trade certification’s taking right now. I mean, the current probs with fair trade certification have been under heavy discussion since before I even got really involved with fair trade. The same discussions keep happening, without getting resolved…

Here’s hoping at least some resolutions come out of this workshop.

This is the statement we came up with through the workshop: “Fair trade success means control of fair trade standards (by the 100% fair traders) with strict enforcement and application of fair trade principles to sellers in the North, in which corporations play role to achieve consumer understanding and appreciation of fair trade standards and realize responsible growth to gain 5% of the market.”

I know — It’s wordy, and grammatically bizzare. It’s a rough draft :P

I believe all participants in the summit should be getting copies of the statements that came out of the other workshops. I’m looking forward to getting that in the mail –

Update: Here are deets on the 2nd workshop :)