Fair Trade. The words speak for themselves: fair means "respectful" and "honorable," trade means "barter" and "interchange." But it has begun to occur to me that there are people who don't see fair trade in quite the same way. In the USA, protectionists on the Right are invoking fair trade as an appetizer for isolationism. Where is the concept of "respectful interchange" in that?

My own experience of fair trade has been vastly different and — hopefully — much more encouraging.

It probably started as long ago as my helping my mother in her café after school and at weekends. Working there taught me that business wasn't a financial science. First and foremost, it was about an exchange, about buying and selling. My mother's bottom line was truth to her values. It meant bringing your heart and your humanity to work. I learned at an early age that these are as essential for business as they are for life.

When I look back now, I can see that my mother's café also embodied the new model of business whose slow, difficult emergence we've been tracking over the past few decades. This new model is looking for a bottom line other than price and profit. Does such a thing exist? It's scarcely a new question — John Ruskin was debating the same thing in the 19th century — but it has become one of the central issues of our new century. That's because business itself is now the most powerful force for change in the world today, richer and faster by far than most governments. And what is it doing with this power? It is using free trade, the most powerful weapon at its disposal, to tighten its grip on the globe.

I've heard free trade apologists argue that living and working conditions are likely to be worst when foreign investment is lowest, but even they concede this is not the case with the garment and footwear industries. The plain fact is that a number of basic human rights have been compromised by the fluctuations in the international labor market that globalization has fostered.

My own company's commitment to the protection of human rights has always been a non-negotiable part of the corporate DNA. It seems absolutely fundamental to me that our freedom to do business rests on other, more profound freedoms. The response, the interchange, is the essence of trading. That's why the idea of partnering has always been so appealing to me. And that's why The Body Shop [2] has been putting resources into building a model of "community trade" that points to an alternative. Our emphasis is on supporting small-scale economic initiatives wherever we go, keeping communities vital. We now have 40 such initiatives in 26 countries around the world. We are concerned about quality in trade, not just quantity. That means supporting black family farms in America, or building a new fiber economy, or supporting new ecological designers, or teaching our employees community organizing.

It means Mexico, where, in the Mesquital Valley, north of Mexico City, the women of the Nanhu Indian tribe have been using ancient techniques perfected by the Aztecs to make body scrubs from the fibers of the maguey cactus. Indigenous women, who 10 years ago would find it difficult to leave their remote villages, have formed themselves into an association to strengthen their communities and work towards making a sustainable living. For 10 years, with the help of NGOs, they have exported their exquisite handicrafts to The Body Shop in an attempt to avoid becoming "wet backs" like so many of their family who risk their lives as illegal immigrants in the USA. The USA, where the cheap labor of thousands of such "invisible" hands, subsidizes the economy of the most powerful nation on earth.

Thanks to efforts by The Body Shop, NGOs, and the Mexico government's Solidaridad program, the women are making a sustainable living — even if it's still very tough.

Mexico, where globalization brought NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, which promised wealth and prosperity through the expansion of "free" trade but where thousands of indigenous people, like the Nahnu women we trade with, are still deprived of their most basic human rights. Mexico, where the demand for a voice for the disenfranchised indigenous population was brought into dramatic relief by the march of the guerrilla leader subcomandante Marcos on the capital city in March 2001, having eluded the might of the Mexican army for 17 years in the jungle of Chiapas. The same Chiapas where Fair Trade organizations like Twin Trading and Café Direct are also trading with coffee farmers to offer a dignified alternative to the type of "freedom" a la NAFTA.

The war that subcomandante Marcos has led in Chiapas for the last 17 years is being fought by small producers on many fronts and in many different ways all over the world. Far from bringing freedom, globalization continues to tighten the yoke of domination on the world's poor. The freedom that comes with globalization is freedom for the rich and powerful nations to further exploit and further marginalize those at the bottom of the social ladder. It is precisely these people that I am interested in working with in their struggle to take control over their own destinies. Every single one of the groups in our Community Trade program is waging this war and I believe that trade which is fair, trade that is free from exploitation, trade that brings dignity rather than dehumanizing, can play an important role in winning this war.

And women are demonstrating time and time again that they are powerful adversaries in this war. In the North East of Brazil they took on the large landowners in their struggle to gain access to the fruits of the wild-growing babassu palm. They stood up to the hired gunmen who tried to expel them from the forest as they demanded their right to something they considered a gift from God. They waged war for ten years to gain their "free babassu" because it provides them with their only means of subsistence, it is their currency for purchasing the basic food stuffs they can not grow on their tiny land-holdings. Many lives were lost in that war, but they won and now their right to the fruits of the forest is written in legislation which prevents land barons from chopping down trees. The women see themselves as the guardians of the forest. They now form part of a powerful women's movement and part of a Cooperative which has been converting the babassu nuts into oil and selling to The Body Shop since 1994. The power of their movement is conveyed in these lines from the hymn to the Babassu breaker: