Fair to the last drop: Corporate challenges to Fairtrade

The Fairtrade Labelling Organization International (FLO) and Fairtrade certifiers promote the idea that Fairtrade should become more "mainstream". Most recent criticism revolves around this strategy. For the largest coffee buyers, Fairtrade makes up only a tiny proportion of their coffee purchases. For these companies Fairtrade is not a social movement or a business ethic, but rather a public relations opportunity and a profitable niche. One Fairtrade product can make the whole brand seem socially responsible, even though the corporation continues to buy the vast majority of its coffee on the conventional market. This phenomenon has many actors in Fairtrade questioning the meaning of fair trade. Is the goal to help as many peasant farmers as possible by selling as much Fairtrade coffee as possible? Or is the goal to transform coffee's historically unfair market structures? Are markets the engine for social change or are social movements the force to change markets? These questions reflect the growing disagreement among Fairtrade advocates over whether it is advisable to mainstream Fairtrade through the very corporations and market structures that provoked the coffee crisis in the first place.