In the first decades of this century, Balbina Denis' grandmother wasn't allowed to wear her mola. The colorful handstitched cloth--which features traditional designs and is worn on the blouses of Kuna women living on islands off the Caribbean coast of Panama--was banned by politicians and missionaries eager to assimilate the isolated tribe into modern society. 
    In 1925, the Kuna revolted and won relative political autonomy. Kuna women once again could craft and wear the mola proudly, a symbol of their cultural identity. 
    In the years since, Kuna women have discovered they could earn money to support their families by selling their art to tourists and retailers from abroad. Yet their isolation left them with a small percentage of the final sales price. Kuna molas sold in London or New York at a 1,000 percent markup over what their creators earned for two weeks or more of painstaking labor. 
    And then Balbina Denis and 1,500 other Kuna women turned to the Internet. With help from Peoplink, a U.S.-based fair trade organization, Denis and her coworkers began last year to use modern technology to break the isolation that kept them victims of unjust trade. "We may be illiterate, but we are organized," proclaims Denis, former president of the Kuna Mola cooperative. 
    Equipped with digital cameras, the Kuna women photograph their wares and send the photos via email to Peoplink, where they are placed on the group's website. Consumers make purchases via the Internet, thus keeping overhead low. Peoplink takes 30 percent of the sale price, allowing the women who stitch the molas a much better return on their labor than what they earn from traditional sales channels. 
    "It has helped us a lot and we like it," says Jessica Smith, a Kuna woman who keeps the books at the coop's Panama City office. "This is the only thing that allows many of the women in the islands to feed their children." 
    Peoplink is just one of dozens of fair trade organizations (FTOs) in Europe and North America that are busy chipping away at the unjust foundations of international commerce. Still mice in a world of transnational elephants--alternative trade accounts for perhaps 0.01 percent of global commerce--the FTOs are nonetheless making important inroads. 
    Cafédirect--a European FTO whose products bear the motto "You get excellent coffee, they get a better deal"--now sells 3 percent of all coffee sold in the United Kingdom. It won that market share not by merger or acquisition--the modern capitalist's tools of building a consumer base--but rather by appealing to the British public to consume with responsibility. 
    There's an audience for such a pitch. In a United Kingdom survey, 86 percent of consumers said they were now aware of fair trade products and 68 percent said they were willing to pay more for them. And the House of Commons announced in October that it would serve only fairly-traded coffee and tea in its dining rooms. 
    The fair trading relationship often serves as an educational tool as well. Lutheran World Relief, for example, buys Nicaraguan coffee from Equal Exchange, a U.S. FTO, and sells it to congregations in Wisconsin where parishioners stir political education into their coffee during the social hour. British families surf into Oxfam's website for recipes featuring fairly traded food items from the Caribbean. 
    Ten Thousand Villages, a 52-year old Mennonite FTO that brings products from over 30 countries to sell throughout North America, places emphasis on telling the stories of its producers through magazine articles and visits by delegations to southern countries. In the last six years the organization has started opening stores in suburban shopping malls, reaching many new customers with little exposure to the life stories of Third World people. 
    Some of those stories recount repression, as worker activists seeking fairer conditions and contracts suffer reprisals from traditional market players who benefit from injustice. Several artisan coops in Guatemala, for example, have had leaders arrested and disappeared. 
    Fair traders may face violence in coming years from drug traffickers utilizing agriculture in Central America to launder profits. "Buyers show up in the fields with bags of money, often offering payment well above the market price. Money made from drug deals is thus converted into an agricultural product that can be legitimately marketed anywhere in the world," notes Mike Woodard, executive director of the Managua-based Center for Development in Central America. "Small farmers trying to work with fair trade arrangements already risk incurring the wrath of powerful business and political interests. Now they've got to face drug lords who don't have a reputation of liking competition." 
    Many of the FTOs have their roots in development organizations that started marketing handicrafts from artisan groups in the Third World. Such marketing partnerships were often dependent on volunteer labor to sell the products in Mennonite bazaars in Pennsylvania or an Oxfam shop in Liverpool. Many activists argue that while some church-based FTOs will continue to use volunteers, mainline companies shouldn't depend on them. "We can only exist in the long run if we're competitive in the marketplace," says Woodard. "We cannot depend on sympathetic consumers to buy our products just because we're the good guys. We've got to work cooperatively to beat traditional business at its own game." 
    The fair trade market is changing. Several Guatemalan crafts cooperatives have folded in the last two years when orders stopped arriving from northern FTOs. The market went flat when solidarity activists apparently ran out of room on their coffee tables and walls to place more brightly-colored weavings. FTOs are selling less crafts and more food items these days. 
    FTOs often help producer groups with organizational assistance, encouraging democratic and nonsexist organizational structures. Long-term credit and guaranteed prices also helped build stability for small producers and protect them from market vagaries. Cafédirect, for example, offers its producers in Latin America advance payments of up to 60 percent and guarantees a premium of 10 percent above prevailing market prices. 
    Such fair trade relationships usually work well, but there are problems. 
    When coffee prices soared during last year's speculative market, more than one Central American producer group reneged on contracts they had negotiated with FTOs and sold their beans at a greater profit on the open market. And a large organization of Nicaraguan agricultural cooperatives, Proterra, recently went bankrupt after Earth Trade, its U.S. partner, failed to honor a large contract, leaving Proterra with a huge inventory. 
    What began in solidarity can also sometimes end in exploitation. "Although most fair trade organizations begin out of altruistic concern, the people who work in the office can forget why they are there," Woodard observes. "The nice working conditions, a car and driver, the trips overseas to promote business, all become very seductive. Soon the peasant in the field is a means to securing this comfortable job, rather than being the reason for doing the job. What started out as a fair trade business becomes just a business. And there are always people who can do business better than ex-do-gooders." 
    Peoplink founder Daniel Salcedo says consumers are today demanding better quality products and FTOs must respond. Salcedo once ran Pueblo to People, a prominent FTO that marketed Latin American products. "Yet it didn't move with the times," Salcedo observes. "It needed to work beyond Latin America and improve product designs." 
    Learning from experience and encouraging producers to more rapidly respond to changing markets, Peoplink provides an Internet web page where designers and buyers can comment on cloth and product designs. And although he has yet to turn a profit, Salcedo believes cyber-intermediaries like Peoplink represent the future because they benefit people at each end of the transaction. "Our efficiency at using the Internet," Salcedo predicts, "should make the price work for both the buyer and the producer." 
                                                                - From Tegucigalpa, Paul Jeffrey