Booth was the local Salvation Army’s commander and he saw the opportunity to import tea of the highest quality from Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and sell it in Auckland. The peculiarities of this entrepreneurial endeavour were that all profits went directly into Salvation Army work and — above all — that the business model allowed farmers to buy back their own farms.



As the Salvation Army’s blogpost highlights, at a time when slavery was still legal in 20 countries, this was no mean feat.

The evolving business models, the 1929 economic crisis, and World War II put these early attempts at fair trade on hold. After the war, a few religious organizations tried to create fair supply chains but it was only in the 1960s that the current fair trade model was put in place in Europe with programmes such as “Helping-by-Selling” by the British NGO Oxfam.



At the time, fair trade products (mainly handcraft items and agricultural goods) were sold in so-called “Worldshops” — retail outlets often run on a volunteer basis. These outlets were often hugely successful but they certainly couldn’t compete with the massive distribution of fast-spreading supermarkets.