Global Fairtrade sales increase by 47%
Worldwide consumers spent over 2.3 billion euros on Fairtrade certified products in 2007. This represents a 47% increase on the previous year and means that over 1.5 million producers and workers in 58 developing countries now benefit from Fairtrade sales.

Impressive growth can be seen across all product categories. In particular, sales of juices have almost quadrupled, sugar have doubled and bananas have increased by 72%. Coffee, the first and one of the most established Fairtrade products, continued to grow steadily with an increase of 19%. Fairtrade cotton farmers have also seen demand for their produce more than double in just one year. During 2007, the sales of items made out of Fairtrade certified cotton, ranging from cotton wool to jeans and towels, surpassed 14 million individual items.

The growth is the result of the expansion in existing markets and the opening of new ones. The value of sales in Fairtrade’s biggest markets, the UK and US, grew by 72% and 46% respectively. Sweden and Norway were home to the fastest growing markets for Fairtrade with increases of 166% and 110% respectively. The highest per capita consumption in the world was in Switzerland where consumers spent an average of €20.8 on Fairtrade products in 2007.

Twenty-four activists and educators from five states met for two days at the Highlander Research and Education Center in New Market, Tennessee to learn about the Solidarity Economy and build relationships for future work together. The group included people working on immigrant rights, sustainability education, living wages, police brutality, the cradle to prison pipeline, using art for social change, alternatives to militarism, community building, sustainable economic development, youth leadership and more. More...

Rwanda provides a powerful study of the negative societal impacts of free market inefficiencies. The genocide of 1994 resulted from a series of events significantly exacerbated by the collapse of the International Coffee Agreement.

Our History

Founded in 1916, the National Cooperative Business Association was known as the Cooperative League of America until 1922 and as the Cooperative League of the USA (CLUSA) until 1985. It was the first national organization for cooperatives.Though NCBA's name has changed over the years, its primary mission never has. For nearly 80 years it has been dedicated to developing, advancing and protecting cooperatives. It is the national voice for cooperatives, helping them compete in a changing economic and political environment.

Read more at: www.ncba.coop

Towards the

Solidarity Economy:

A View from India

By InfoChange India

News & Features

http://www.infochangeindia.org

Knoxville Citizens

Want a Say in

Spending their Money

Building Alternatives

for People and Planet

Edited by Jenna Allard,
Carl Davidson and Julie Matthaei

ChangeMaker Publications.
pp. 427, $25.00.

http://www.lulu.com/changemaker

Review by Jerry Harris
Global Studies Association

We finally have a book that gives a clear and partisan voice to the solidarity economy. While not so widely known within the continental U.S., this important and growing movement has deep historic roots in the international experience of cooperative economics, especially in the third world. It has especially gained in strength and depth over the last two decades.

The movement covers a broad range of alternatives in the realm of political economy that promote the social control of capital. It has no one platform or framework; rather, it has grown in opposition to the hardships caused by neoliberalism and "low road, race-to-the-bottom" capitalism.

Photo: Denise Obregon, Sewing Cooperativista

Venezuela's Experiments
in the Solidarity Economy

By Humberto Márquez

CARACAS, Nov 17 (IPS) - "I used to be a buhonera (street vendor), but I got tired of working in all weather conditions, rain or shine, so I joined the Venezuela Avanza (Venezuela Advances) cooperative. Here I earn less money and the heat in the warehouse is stifling, but we hope our working conditions will improve with time," Ana Ortiz, a mother of seven, told IPS as she sat at her sewing machine.

State-financed cooperatives are mushrooming in Venezuela, hand-in-hand with the boom in oil prices, and are supposed to be laying the foundations of a new socioeconomic model. However, some weaknesses are showing through, such as the creation of "phantom cooperatives" and a lack of self-financing.