1) In 2011, the estimated retail value of Fairtrade goods sold was nearly $7 billion.
2) In 2009 - 2010, producer organizations reported selling 600,000 metric tons of certified products worth more than $700 million dollars (mostly coffee and bananas). About half of these sales were in the US and the UK, with the UK market being the larger by far.
3) In 2011, bananas accounted for about half the volume of Fairtrade goods sold, while nearly half the value was accounted for by coffee. Sugar has grown rapidly and the volume of Fairtrade certified sugar sold surpassed that for coffee in 2009, but it is a bulky product and accounts for a small share of the valie of sales. Cocoa accounts for about 6 percent of the market by volume and 11 percent by value, while fresh fruit (other than bananas), tea, cotton, honey, spices, cotton, and other other minor products account for the remainder.
4) Latin America represents the largest sourcing location (because of the high product concetration on bananas and coffee) with just over half of the certified producer organizations. By 2011, however, Africa was home to almost a third of the product organization certified to FairTrade, while fewer than one in five were in Asia. Mexico, until recently, was home to more certified producer organizations than any other country, mostly for coffee, but it has been surpassed by Peru, Columbia, India, and Kenya, with South Africa now just behind Mexico. All the other countries with as many as 20 certified producer organizations were in Latin America. African certified producer organizations contain just over half of all individual members globally (mostly hired workers on plantations), but reap only about a quarter of sales. Latin America has only a quarter of farmers and workers in the Fairtrade system but, with its dominance in fair-trade coffee, it earns nearly 70% of global sales revenues.
5) On the consumption side, Europe and United States were home to more than 80% of the traders and retailers licenses to use the Fairtrade mark in 2006, the last year when the data was available. These destinations account for virtually all sales. Despite its much smaller size, the United Kingdom surpassed the United States as the largest Fairtrade market in 2008, reaching a level of $2 billion in 2011, some $34 per person. Per capital consumption is highest in Ireland and Switzerland, where citizens bought on average of $50 worth of Fairtrade goods in 2011. Despite being early adopters, Japan and Italy, has lower average per capita sales well below those in other countries. I
In the United States, the vast majority of Fairtrade-certified sales are coffee, which accounted for 4 percent of US imports of unroasted coffee in 2010. In Europe, for those markets where data is available, coffee reached a roughly 2 percent share in 2004 in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, and Ireland, 6 percent in Switzerland, and an astonishing 20 percent in the UK. Fairtrade also captured 5 percent of the market in Switzerland and bananas nearly half. Tea also captured a 2 percent market share in Austria and Germany, while bananas reached roughly 2 percent in Austria and Norway, and 4 to 5 percent in Belgium and Finland. Fairtrade chocolate is estimated as 1 percent of global supply.
Source: Elliott, K. 2012. Is my fair trade coffee really fair? Trends and Challenges in Fair Trade Certification. CGD Policy Paper 017, December 2012.