The evolution of the Fair Trade organisational landscape in France and in Belgium

Parallel to the dramatic growth of its sales and public awareness, the Fair Trade movement
has seen its organisational landscape become increasingly diversified. While Fair Trade
nonprofit pioneers were initially relatively homogeneous in terms of goals and structures,
the economic development of the initiative, driven by the sales of Fair Trade products in
mainstream distribution channels, has led to the emergence of a multitude of new actors
with much more heterogeneous behaviours – in spite of the general trend towards a
stronger market orientation – (Gendron, 2004; Moore, 2004; Nicholls & Opal, 2005; Renard,
2003). When observing the evolution of Fair Trade organisations (FTOs), i.e., organisations
claiming to be totally dedicated to Fair Trade, three trends can be observed: Fair Trade
pioneers have adopted more business-oriented profiles and more complex and
specialised organisational structures; New small Fair Trade businesses have emerged with a
stronger economic specialisation on a particular product or distribution channel ; « Old »
and « new » FTOs increasingly gather into networks with two types of purposes: to promote
Fair Trade and to have a minimum political representation (advocacy networks) and to
face common socio-economic challenges (socio-economic networks). The goal of this
contribution is to analyse these three trends with the help of a sample of nearly fourty FTOs
in Belgium and in the French Rhône-Alpes region. We can thus illustrate the three trends on
the basis of both general observations and precise examples. We also try to compare the
two regions and to explore to what extent the evolution of FTOs reveals more global trends
within the Fair Trade movement.