Project: Fair Trade Laos Association

• Participatory Guarantee System
• Standards

• Website

Fair Trade Laos Association is an organization promoting entrepreneurs for local people on the business management, trading, with environmental concern. Certify two types of certificates:
1/ Company Based (Corporative Social Responsibility) using the Lao labor law as the minimum indicators (detail in website) and put it in to the standards items by the agreements from all members and committee board members. In the process of the certification always concern mainly on the company managing, staffs (fair accordingly to the labors law) and the transparency of the company finance (detail of the application steps in available in website
2/ Products Certification, focusing in whole value chain (e.g. cotton product: source of cotton [where is from], what does material cost, how much investment in the producion process, and what including the labor, and indicator of setting price). Enterprineur can submit an application form to Fiar Trade Laos, then the the member of FTL will be selected product for the certification process with individual product.Each type of certification can use the symbol of LFT logo in the organization of the first year and then can use on the products after certified after yeat one. After certification, FTL come to compay to have recheck on all indicators following the indicators.

Consumer still don’t understand why they have to pay higher price for the fair trade certified products due to lack of awareness with supporting from government.
Lao SME unable in enforcement of certification cost (1.5 million kip/year for organization; 0.5 million kip /year/product)) and difficulty for them to follow the certification standard from Fair Trade Laos Association, 90% of the Fair Trade Laos members are foreign investors in agriculture production, and most of SME don’t know the value of their business.
There is no officially support from government in term of promotion of FTL and link to the relavant activities
Financial issue to support Lao SME in covering the cost pf certification process.
Limiting

Increase the members number in the tourism up to 83 members. Link to the government sector in order to promote an important of the Fair Trade Laos to SME.

FTL certification is not recomment for the products only for domestic market because it is take time for the certification process and costly.