With the pan-European campaign Make Fruit Fair!, 15 European and 4 Southern partners claim fair prices, living wages and compliance with labour and human rights as well as environmental protection in the tropical fruit sector.
Bananas are the most traded fruit in the world. The international trade of tropical fruits like bananas, pineapples, oranges, avocados, and mangos is expanding rapidly. So does the market power of supermarket chains and international fruit companies. In the last 30 years, market concentration in the food retail markets in Europe has grown rapidly. In most EU member states, only four or five supermarket groups dominate the grocery market.
Supermarkets are gatekeepers between producers and consumers and have an enormous bargaining power vis-à-vis their suppliers. This enhances traditional exploitation structures. It creates a high price pressure that is pushed down to farmers and agricultural workers at the bottom end of supply chains who as a consequence suffer from low income and precarious working conditions. This high market concentration also increases the potential abuse of buyer power through unfair trading practices (UTPs) – also with acute negative impacts on the lives and livelihoods of developing world farmers and workers.
The Make Fruit Fair! Campaign raises the awareness of EU citizens and consumers on the precarious situation of plantation workers and small farmers producing tropical fruit for the EU-market. We mobilize them to consume fair products, and to take action for basic living standards and decent work for all, respect for human rights, fairer trade relations and sustainable development by urging corporate and political decision makers to ensure fair conditions in the tropical fruit sector through improved institutional and corporate policies at EU and MS level.
More info at www.makefruitfair.org
Foto: © Abbie Trayler-Smith/Oxfam
Posted in the EYD website by Mirjam Hägele, Oxfam Deutschland e.V.