The University of Cambridge has been granted Fairtrade status by the Fairtrade Foundation, a national organisation whose official aim is to empower disadvantaged producers in developing countries by tackling injustice in conventional trade.

This is mainly done by promoting and licensing the Fairtrade certification, a guarantee that products retailed in the UK have been produced in accordance with internationally agreed Fairtrade standards.

The Fairtrade designation currently only applies to facilities run by the university itself, such as lecture site butteries, and does not cover the various constituent colleges of Cambridge. Currently, only Newnham, Fitzwilliam, King’s, St Catharine’s and Robinson can claim to have an officially certified Fairtrade status.

Due to the fact that Fairtrade certificates have to be renewed regularly, several colleges, such as Pembroke and Queens’, have had Fairtrade Marks in the past but no longer have up-to-date Fairtrade status, even if they are still Fairtrade institutions.

As a recognised Fairtrade distributor, the University of Cambridge is joining the ranks of other UK institutions such as Queen’s University Belfast, the Worcester College of Technology, the University of York, LSE, the University of Manchester and the University of Glasgow among others. UK initiatives aimed at securing Fairtrade status for higher education institutions date back to June 2003, when Oxford Brookes became the first university in the UK to be officially given the Fairtrade Mark by the Fairtrade Foundation.

The current CUSU Ethical Consumerism Officer (ECO), Susanna Hartland, who spearheaded the campaign to make Cambridge a Fairtrade institution, spoke to Varsity about the difficulties she encountered during her time as ECO.

Hartland revealed that several of the university’s outlets were already Fairtrade certified. However, in order to fulfil the necessary criteria, she revealed that an official policy had to be created with the approval of the Pro-Vice Chancellor for Institutional Affairs, Professor Jeremy Sanders.

In the past, according to Hartland, it was difficult to meet the Fairtrade Foundation’s standards, as originally at least two-thirds of the university’s colleges had to be recognised as fair-trade before the Fairtrade Mark could be granted.

Now, however, it is enough for the Pro-Vice Chancellor to sign an official policy document with regards to fair trade.

Asked about the scale of the campaign, Hartland revealed that public student support for the Fairtrade initiative was minimal, particularly when compared with other CUSU-affiliated movements such as the Living Wage Campaign. She said:

“It [fair-trade] depends on student lobbying, I’m not sure you can rely on the university staff to do this on their own. If we had needed more lobbying, we may have had to rely on student support.”

Attempts to raise awareness of the work of the Ethical Affairs Team over the summer holidays via student media were fruitless, when Cambridge newspapers seemed “interested in other things”.

With regards to the future of CUSU attempts to promote ethical consumerism, Susanna Hartland stated:

“I am worried about the fact that CUSU has changed the structure of standing orders.”

The replacement of the post of Ethical Consumerism Officer by a broader Ethical Affairs Team, which runs the Go Greener, Living Wage and Socially Responsible Investment Campaigns, as well as the Ethical Consumerism Campaign, has led to fears that Fairtrade will be less prominent.

Hartland also commented on the university’s federal structure, which means it is difficult for the Ethical Affairs Team to create a coherent, college-based strategy.

The structures and aims of different JCRs make it difficult for CUSU to implement fair-trade on a college level.

Fitzwilliam College, for example, has a Green Officer and a Charities Officer, thus spreading responsibilities with regards to the ethics of college actions. Newnham however, only have a Green Officer, and this inconsistency between colleges can prove an obstacle for specific CUSU-affiliated campaigns.

In the words of Hartland: “Colleges are always a challenge, and it very much depends on the people involved.”