Does Fair Trade have a future in this world?

Table of content

1. Introduction and Problem statement.
Nowadays, Fair trade products are hot items. In 2006 worldwide sales came up to 1.6 billion Euros of Fairtrade Certified Products. This was about 42% more than it was the year before. Even the products coffee and cocoa knew a bigger growth in the numbers 53% and 93% respectively (Fairtrade Labelling Organizations International Annual Report, 2006/07)
Fair trade is an alternative approach to trading partnerships that aims for sustainable development of excluded or disadvantaged producers in the Third World. It seeks to achieve this by providing better …show more content…

Also other studies show that price, product quality and shopping convenience often are the most important decision-making factors despite the other issues surrounding ethical products (Boulstrigde and Caarigan, 2000; Carrigan and Atallaa, 2001; CRC-Consommation, 1998; Norberg, 2000; Roberts, 1996; Tallontire et al., 2001, Ultirch and Sarasin, 1995 in de Pelsmacker & Janssens). So in line with the earlier mentioned studies and definition of fair trade, consumers don’t make the effort to search for fair trade products because they are too expensive for products that are unknown for customers.. People will buy what they know and like, instead of trying something new which also knows his higher price.
Therefore we expect that price has a negative direct effect on the ethical buying behavior from consumers.

H1: Price has a direct negative effect on fair trade buying behavior.

2.2 Fair trade concern and fair trade buying behaviour
We can define concern as the positive construct of attitude towards fair trade in general. Concern measures respondent’s concern about fair trade issue, but it also measures respondent’s support for the fair trade issue. (De Pelsmacker & Janssens, 2001).
The greater the concern is about fair trade issues, the more people will like the fair trade products. This is because now they know how important it is for example the farmers to have a fair chance. The degree of consumers’ interest