The Beginning of IFAT

Fair trade (as we now know it) began in the immediate post Second World War years when American church based bodies, the Mennonites and the Church of the Brethren, began trading in a small way with impoverished women’s groups in Puerto Rico and Jordan.

Fair Trade Organisatie, in the Netherlands, was the first European Alternative (Fair) Trade Organization, and was founded in 1959. Oxfam GB, which raised money during the war for the relief of civilian populations in Nazi occupied Europe, continued its humanitarian and disaster relief work after the war and then became involved in work with others to overcome poverty. During the 1960s, this started to include trade with those impoverished communities. In the early 1970s Fair Trade Organisatie founded several similar groups in other European countries, including GEPA in Germany, CLARO in Switzerland and EZA in Austria.

Working with their partners in countries in the South, these and other emerging organizations in the North helped to establish the Southern FTOs that organise producers and production, provide social services to producers, and export to the North. During the 1970s also, volunteers working with Oxfam Australia (then known as Community Aid Abroad) started trading, as did Trade Aid in New Zealand.

By the late 1970s, many of the Northern FTOs were meeting in conference every two or three years, and by the end of the 1980s they decided to set up an association to further improve the way they worked together.

IFAT was founded (as the International Federation for Alternative Trade), in 1989 by 36 Northern Fair Trade Organizations meeting in Noordwijk, The Netherlands. The key decision taken at the founding conference was to admit producer organizations in the South as full members of the new body with equal status with the Northern organizations. Today, two thirds of IFAT’s membership comes from the South.