Britain’s second-biggest supermarket faces mounting pressure over axing the Fairtrade label from tea for its own ethical sourcing logo, which has sparked fears more companies could drop the certification scheme that supports poor farmers.
Sainsbury’s, the world’s largest retailer of Fairtrade products, started stamping its own “Fairly Traded” label on its home brand tea in May as part of a pilot scheme to move to an internally managed ethical sourcing scheme.
The retailer said its initiative improved on the 25-year-old Fairtrade model, in which companies can use the logo if they guaranteed farmers a fair price for crops and an extra premium to spend on community projects such as roads and schools.
However, the supermarket’s decision has prompted concerns that poor farmers would be impacted, and the pilot could lead to the logo being dropped from other products and spread to other companies — especially after Cadbury quit the scheme last year.
An online petition opposing the move now has more than 70,000 signatures, while on Wednesday campaigners from charities Oxfam and Cafod, in tea bag costumes and waving placards, protested outside the company’s annual general meeting.
“Sainsbury’s is removing what little control some of the poorest tea farmers and producers have on how they spend the money they make,” Oxfam campaigns director Matthew Spencer said in a statement.
Under Fairtrade, on top of earnings from their produce, farming communities receive a bonus, or premium, worth about 10 percent of the tea price, which they collectively decide how to spend.
The money usually goes toward healthcare, education and housing projects, Spencer said.
He said with Sainsbury’s pilot, farmers would have to apply to a board set up by the supermarket to receive the money and described the change as a “power grab.”
“We don’t believe the execution of this current model will, on balance, deliver positive changes for tea farmers,” Fairtrade Foundation chief executive Michael Gidney said.
A spokesman for Sainsbury’s denied the farmers would lose out, saying farmers would continue to receive all the funding currently in place and the pilot had safeguards to ensure the money reached “those it is intended for.”
“’Fairly Traded’ goes further than the current model with more benefits, including longer-term commercial relationships and individually-tailored data and support to help them make their businesses more resilient and sustainable,” Sainsbury chief executive Mike Coupe said.
Coupe said that the pilot did not save the supermarket any money and had no impact on tea prices.
“Rather than shout from the sidelines, we would encourage everyone to be open-minded, and see if the pilot can be successful and improve lives,” he added.
Fairtrade is a global operation that works with over a million farmers and workers in Africa and the Middle East, and more than 250,000 across Latin America, Asia and the Pacific.
Intel Corp chief executive officer Lip-Bu Tan (陳立武) is expected to meet with Taiwanese suppliers next month in conjunction with the opening of the Computex Taipei trade show, supply chain sources said on Monday. The visit, the first for Tan to Taiwan since assuming his new post last month, would be aimed at enhancing Intel’s ties with suppliers in Taiwan as he attempts to help turn around the struggling US chipmaker, the sources said. Tan is to hold a banquet to celebrate Intel’s 40-year presence in Taiwan before Computex opens on May 20 and invite dozens of Taiwanese suppliers to exchange views
Application-specific integrated circuit designer Faraday Technology Corp (智原) yesterday said that although revenue this quarter would decline 30 percent from last quarter, it retained its full-year forecast of revenue growth of 100 percent. The company attributed the quarterly drop to a slowdown in customers’ production of chips using Faraday’s advanced packaging technology. The company is still confident about its revenue growth this year, given its strong “design-win” — or the projects it won to help customers design their chips, Faraday president Steve Wang (王國雍) told an online earnings conference. “The design-win this year is better than we expected. We believe we will win
Power supply and electronic components maker Delta Electronics Inc (台達電) yesterday said it plans to ship its new 1 megawatt charging systems for electric trucks and buses in the first half of next year at the earliest. The new charging piles, which deliver up to 1 megawatt of charging power, are designed for heavy-duty electric vehicles, and support a maximum current of 1,500 amperes and output of 1,250 volts, Delta said in a news release. “If everything goes smoothly, we could begin shipping those new charging systems as early as in the first half of next year,” a company official said. The new
SK Hynix Inc warned of increased volatility in the second half of this year despite resilient demand for artificial intelligence (AI) memory chips from big tech providers, reflecting the uncertainty surrounding US tariffs. The company reported a better-than-projected 158 percent jump in March-quarter operating income, propelled in part by stockpiling ahead of US President Donald Trump’s tariffs. SK Hynix stuck with a forecast for a doubling in demand for the high-bandwidth memory (HBM) essential to Nvidia Corp’s AI accelerators, which in turn drive giant data centers built by the likes of Microsoft Corp and Amazon.com Inc. That SK Hynix is maintaining its
RSS