Fair Trade Craft Movement

A movement built to pay artisans in poorer countries a fair, direct price for handicrafts a middleman market had left underpriced. Ten Thousand Villages, then a Mennonite Central Committee project called Self Help Crafts, began buying and reselling jute goods and cross-stitch work through churches and fairs in 1946; SERRV International followed with a similar mission in 1949, and Oxfam's United Kingdom shops began selling handicrafts made by Chinese refugees before the decade was out. The scattered network of importers and retailers this founded formalized itself as the Fair Trade Federation in 1994, the North American association that still certifies fair trade wholesalers and shops. Alongside the World Crafts Council's own mission to sustain traditional craft economies, the movement treats a handmade object's price as a statement about the maker's life, not only the object's quality.