Fair Trade Tobacco
1st-nation and fair trade tobacco.
From the beginning, the vision was of a certified fair trade cigarette. However no fair trade organisation in the world currently has standards written to cover fair trade tobacco production.
So we contacted the Fairtrade Labelling Organisation (Germany), CTM (Italy), Transfair (USA) and the Fairtrade Foundation (UK). Every one of these approaches for fair trade cigarette accreditation was unsuccessful.
Whilst individuals in these organisations expressed a desire to help impoverished tobacco farmers, without exception they felt that fair trade tobacco was too politically sensitive a crop for their organisation to engage with.
Reluctantly we decided we would have to ethically source our own tobacco, write our own trading standards for ethically sourced tobacco and fund our farmers accordingly. This, we at 1st -nation , have done.