Komitee Steun Onderontwikkelde Streken, later S.O.S. Wereldhandel (S.O.S. World trade) is the predecessor of Fairtrade Original. The Christian organisation was founded in the Dutch town of Kerkrade and started with collecting money for children suffering from malnutrition in Sicily, Italy. After that, they started to raise funds for projects in developing countries.
After working in the humanitarian aid sphere for a while, the organisation switched to supporting trade in 1967. This switch was triggered by a letter from the Roman Catholic Father Bohnen to the S.O.S. chairperson Paul Meijs. Father Bohnen started a workplace for woodcarvers in Haiti with the support of S.O.S. As the workplace grew, it outgrew the local market. Bohnen asked Meijs if the loans could be repaid in kind. Meijs shipped the woodcarvings to Kerkrade and succeeded surprisingly well in selling them. Bohnen was not the only producer that had difficulties with selling its products on the local market. Meijs found the solution for this problem in the European market.
The products that S.O.S. started with were mainly woodcarvings and other handcrafted products from Haiti, Macau and the Philippines. These products were initially sold to the financial supporters of the S.O.S. and through churches. The organisation grew rapidly in the 1970s because of growing sales in Germany and Belgium and the creation of quite some Wereldwinkels (world shops) in the Netherlands.
What started out as a one-man business in 1967 grew out to a foundation with 13 paid staff and a large number of volunteers. In 1972, S.O.S. reached a revenue of 1.601.000 Dutch guilders, which went up to 2.556.000 guilders in 1973. S.O.S. grew into an international organisation with the start of subsidiaries in Belgium, Germany, Switzerland and Austria. However, after internal disputes about the democratisation of the foundation, the German, Swiss and Austrian subsidiaries became independent organisations. This meant a loss of revenue and therefore S.O.S. opened shops in the Netherlands and improved the connections with the Wereldwinkels. These world shops became the most important customer of S.O.S.
A discussion on what was more important, the sale of products or the (political) attention to analyse large trade structures and to push for change in these structures, and another discussion on a more democratic organisation of S.O.S. led to a difficult period for the foundation. In this period the S.O.S. fair-trade initiator Paul Meijs left the organisation. After a couple of reorganisations, the foundation got back on its feet in the second half of the 1980s. In 1987, the Dutch parliament started to use the coffee of S.O.S. and other organisations followed this example. After certified coffee was introduced at the end of the decade, fair-trade coffee sales increased even more.
S.O.S. World Trade (later Fair-Trade Organisation) reached an even larger public in the 1990s. Next to its trade goals, the Fair-Trade Organisation also had political goals. The organisation put fair trade on the political agenda in the Netherlands and in Europe. As Corporate Social Responsibility became a more important topic in the 2000s, the Fair-Trade Organisation grew. However, the competition also grew, which led to a rebranding of the organisation and its products. From 2007 onwards, the organisation accomplished a breakthrough with more "Fair Trade Original" products being sold in supermarkets.
Sources:
NICC Archive:
A04261: Judith van der Stelt, Since 59: 50 years Fair Trade Original (2009).
