50 YEARS IN FAIR TRADE

Martin Kunz has been active in Fair Trade for more than 45 years. From the time when he served with local Non Governmental Organizations in Kolkata in the mid 1970 until today, he was part of a group that founded one of the first World Shops in Germany, he was the first chairman of the board of directors of gepa, the world’s largest Alternative Trade Organization, he was founding executive secretary of the global Fairtrade label association TransFair International (TFI) and also of its successor FairTrade Labelling Organization (FLO - nowadays Fairtrade international). In 1994 he wrote the first criteria for Fairtrade labelled tea (which included the introduction of the ’Joint Body’ concept, which became blueprint for criteria involving hired labour) and for Fairly Traded soccerballs (1998).Most recently he expanded Fair Trade to cover natural rubber, and for nine years he was the director of the Fair Rubber Association. He is still active with his company Diversity Honeys Ltd., raising awareness for issues such as biodiversity (particularly pollinator diversity) by selling honey from Asian honey bees and plastic free gardening products. This book brings together some of his writing, including his PhD thesis on ’Third World Shops’, which becomes electronically available for the first time.