Corporate power challenges the Fair Trade movement.

The Fair Trade movement has experienced a number of challenges since the late 1990s when AJP was founded. Corporate actors have long sought to defang Fair Trade through “fairwashing,” coopting existing certifications or creating corporate-friendly competitor labels; this was a problem that the Domestic Fair Trade Association tried to confront head on by comparing competing standards, and that contentious evaluation effort was a primary reason the association fell apart. Fairwashing is not the only problem, though. The Fair World Project issued a sobering report in 2022 highlighting that Fair Trade—as a movement and strategy—has failed to deliver on most of its promises; and their 2023 investigation of fair trade certification of Mexican produce revealed serious problems, as well.¹ While Fair Trade efforts have accomplished good things, “too often certification has helped replicate, and even reinforce, the dynamics between worker and boss, and between the so-called Global South (producers) and Global North (purchasers).”²

What of domestic fair trade? Much of the energy that propelled the formation of the Domestic Fair Trade Association persists in various organizing and solidarity economy efforts, even though the DFTA is no longer a space for bringing those groups together. Both the Food Chain Workers Alliance (FCWA) and the HEAL Food Alliance took shape alongside the DFTA, and both of those BIPOC-led organizations are still building fair trade from the bottom up. Emphasizing the need for fairness all along the supply chain, they have brought the cross-sector model of the DFTA into public food procurement through the Good Food Purchasing Program (GFPP), a framework for awarding contracts to producers and distributors that meet fair labor standards as well as environmental and other criteria. FCWA and HEAL convene the Good Food Communities Campaign (GFC) to advance local coalitions of food and farmworkers, farmers, and community groups looking to win changes in government procurement around racial, worker, and environmental justice, while also increasing transparency around suppliers.³ Some of these campaigns have shown impressive progress, as in Chicago.⁴ But a hurdle across the board has been recruiting or developing producers who can meet higher ethical standards while also producing the large volumes of food that public institutions require and navigating opaque procurement processes. As AJP experienced in our work, as well, there remains much to do to ramp up farm production that meets higher labor and ecological standards.

* * * * *

Related to Fair Trade is the world of “Multi-Stakeholder Initiatives” (MSI), a form of Corporate Social Responsibility where corporations monitor their supply chains for violations of social standards. MSIs’ history spans roughly the same period as AJP. Viewed from 2025, the track record of MSIs is one of routinely sidelining workers and failing to stop bad practices.⁵ Many movement allies and observers see greater promise and accountability in Worker Driven Social Responsibility (WDSR), where worker-led organizations oversee the enforcement of standards. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers were first to introduce the WDSR model in agriculture in the 1990s with campaigns that later evolved into their Fair Food Program; FFP has expanded dramatically over the intervening years to new crops and regions, winning much positive press. Justicia Migrante/Migrant Justice of Vermont follows the same strategy with their Milk With Dignity program, working to bring fair working conditions to dairy farms.

A key mechanism for WDSR is corporate campaigns: publicly shaming corporations for the bad practices in their supply chains, through outreach, protests, boycotts, and other actions. Currently, the future of corporate campaigns looks especially challenging, as corporations seek new ways to insulate themselves from public pressure (see below). Movements will need to sharpen our strategies to match.

On corporate impunity#

“One of the questions that we are all really grappling with is, what does it mean to run corporate campaigns in an environment of increasing corporate impunity? We have decades of campaigning that has happened at this point, and some of these corporations are immune to being campaigned on. Walmart doesn’t really get that fussed about being campaigned on. Nestlé had their lawyer stand up in front of the Supreme Court and say ‘there weren’t really consequences for the makers of Zyklon B for the Nazi camps, so maybe we shouldn’t have consequences either.’ If your counsel is willing to call up the Nazis in your defense, I feel like the bar for corporate shame has gone very low. Still, I think that one of my great delights as somebody who does corporate campaigning is that moment where a company has ‘baby’s first PR crisis’ and realizes that people do care about conditions in their supply chains that they’d treated as out of sight, out of mind—or worse.

“It is something that we all have to think about. How do we raise the risk for corporations in this environment? The US is definitely backpedaling on regulations and legal consequences on a lot of levels and also moving towards less and less accountable forms of corporate governance. Those of us who run campaigns against corporations have long been able to rely on things like SEC filings. This information has to be shared from publicly traded companies. Some of that is under threat right now. And private equity ownership is growing fast: one-fifth of companies in the US are controlled by private equity. That is essentially a black box there. So that is a huge challenge that we have to face collectively.

“In general, we need to sharpen our economic thinking to catch up with the current era where so much of our world is financialized. So much of what is in the public discourse is based on the economics that they were teaching in high school textbooks 30 years ago. At this point, supply and demand is often not what’s driving so many of the things we see from rising prices to bankruptcies.”

Anna Canning, Partners for Dignity and Rights, interview

On the rise of private equity and their role in Donald Trump’s coalition, see Melinda Cooper, “Family Capitalism and the Small Business Insurrection,” 2022.