Fairtrade Fortnight: a sweet gesture from Tate & Lyle
In a surprise move this week, sugar giant Tate & Lyle has announced that it is to gain fairtrade certification for all of its cane sugar, starting with its best-selling product: the white, granulated stuff.
The aim is to make all of Tate & Lyle's sugars fairtrade by 2009. As you might imagine, this is one of the biggest certification projects in the entire history of fairtrade, and will benefit 6,000 growers in Belize. In fact, converting Tate & Lyle's products to fairtrade will involve certifying ten times more sugar than the total volume of fairtrade sugar currently sold in the UK. That's an awful lot of cups of tea, even for builders...
Fairtrade Foundation Executive Director Harriet Lamb commented: “Fairtrade is already making a big difference to the lives of more than seven million people in the developing world, but there are millions more we’d like to reach. In terms of size and scale, this is the biggest ever Fairtrade switch by a UK company and it’s tremendous this iconic UK brand is backing Fairtrade. We’d now like to encourage other companies of the same size and scale as Tate & Lyle to think actively about making a similar commitment. The more we can make Fairtrade the norm, the more its positive impact can be felt by farmers and their communities across the developing world.”
