The quick answer is “No. Not officially” but its a bit more complicated than that.  Crawley may well qualify to be a Fairtrade town but so far it has not had that official accreditation.  There is now a concerted effort to get that accreditation

There are five criteria that have to be met for a town to qualify as an official Fairtrade town. The first is for the council to pass a resolution supporting Fairtrade and to serve Fairtrade tea and coffee at meetings and in offices and canteens.  Just about the last thing I did before leaving the council was to propose such a resolution, which was accepted.  I’m not sure if they are now serving the tea and coffee, but I would like to hope so.

I think we are OK on three of the remaining criteria, or they are being worked on, but we need a little help with the last one.  In order to be recognised as a Fairtrade town Crawley needs to submit details of at least 20 retail outlets and 10 catering places that serve/sell at least 2 Fairtrade items.

The details to be submitted are the name and address, a contact person (usually the manager) and list of Fairtrade items stocked.  There must be more than that number of shops, cafes, restaurants, etc. in the town but we need to track them down.  Any suggestions of places we can go to check out?  They must stock at least two products with the Fairtrade logo on.

I’m sure Crawley qualifies, its just a matter of proving it.  Any airport workers fancy checking out the many food places in Gatwick during their lunch hours? Do you know of a place which uses Fairtrade products?  Let me know and I’ll pass on the details to the FT people.  I might even be tempted to go and check the places out myself.

We got very close to Fairtrade status last time, so lets try and make it happen in 2008.