Fair Trade is an activity area where CSOs play a key role. Fair Trade is also an activity area promoting the best social, economic and environmental practices of sustainable development. Unfortunately CSOs do not have the means to develop concerted strategies in Research and Technology Development. Their short term concerns often prevent them to have the necessary hindsight. The main objective of the Geo Fair Trade project is to bring together Fair Trade CSOs and RTD performers. Discussions with the principle Fair Trade stakeholders and actors have shown that their basic needs to win new markets and new consumers are Transparency and Traceability. Taking advantage of the results obtained in two FP5 and FP6 research projects, the CCI Gers and its partners CRA-W and CIRAD, together with 5 Fair Trade CSOs, have defined the main objectives of the project whose: 1. To select sustainable development indicators with a spatial component and related to the three dimensions of Fair Trade (social, economic and environmental). 2. To adapt the Geo-traceability Integrated System, set-up in the previous research projects, enabling finding and browsing of all relevant information corresponding to the needs of Fair Trade actors. 3. To validate this approach with six case studies chosen by the CSOs. 4. To develop training and educative tools to disseminate this approach. The Geo Fair Trade project is based on a permanent communication between the RTD performers and the CSOs, who will participate in all scheduled progress meetings, to validate the results or to reorientate the Research and Technology Development activities. The final expected result is a reference framework built on the sustainable development geo-indicators that can be used in all the traceability systems already implemented in Fair Trade. This reference framework will improve the certification of the best practices implemented by the Fair Trade actors.
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