Consumer pressure is at last forcing big business to embrace responsibly produced goods and environmental awareness. But let the buyer beware: a Fairtrade mark on a product line or two does not necessarily turn a multinational giant into an ethical operator

SOMETHING IS stirring in the boardrooms of the world?s biggest companies. It?s as if, after having been lobbied time and time again about Corporate Social Responsibility for years, capitalists have finally decided to do something about it.

The result is a series of striking partnerships, real and potential, which not so long ago would have been regarded as inconceivable: Green & Black?s organic chocolate absorbed by the mass producer Cadbury; Nestl?, reviled by the consumer lobby for its promotion of powdered milk in the Third World, winning a Fairtrade mark for an instant coffee blend; L?Or?al, the cosmetics giant, preparing to pay ?600 million for Body Shop, the chain founded by Anita Roddick, as the very antithesis of corporatism. And now Top Shop will sell the ethical fashion company People Tree?s clothes, made from fair-trade cotton, in its flagship London store.

Meanwhile, the rock star and Africa campaigner Bono has persuaded some of the most iconic and consumerist brands on the planet ? Gap, American Express, Converse and Giorgio Armani, with more to come ? to back Red, a new philanthropic label. These businesses produce goods under the Red label and a percentage of the revenue made is then handed over to the Global Fund to Fight TB, Aids and Malaria.

?We?re not thinking in the old ways about philanthropy, we don?t want these brands to be anything other than what they are: businesses,? said Bono in a recent interview. ?Red will bring them more customers ? that?s OK. We want that. And if we have that, everyone wins here. The more customers they have, the more money goes to the Global Fund.?

?We want to be an attractive proposition, as well as an earnest one,? he added. And that?s what Red is all about, the knowledge that desire ? the desire to shop ? and virtue ? the wish to see the world a better place ? are not always contradictory.

The link between consumers? shopping habits and their wish to be virtuous has also been highlighted by a survey by the Co-operative Bank, which is itself a company that follows an ?ethical investment? policy. Last year spending on ?ethical goods? ? products that don?t hasten climate change, fair trade goods, organic food, clothes that aren?t produced in sweatshops and by children ? rose by nearly a sixth, to ?26 billion.

No wonder, then, that the Waitrose supermarket chain now sells more bars of Green & Black?s than it does Cadbury?s Dairy Milk; Innocent, which makes great play of using only recycled plastic in its bottles of fruit smoothies, has sales of ?16.7 million; and the former Barker?s department store in Kensington High Street will shortly become a giant wholefood shop.

This kind of success is also having an impact on businesses? standing. After a shaky start in 2001, the FTSE4Good share index ? made up of 305 companies in the UK that meet international environmental and social standards ? is now out-performing the traditional FTSE 100 stock market measure. And it?s noticeable that the same companies that are becoming ethically, socially and environmentally aware are also the most highly regarded for the way they are managed.

Why the sudden change in business thinking? Well, it?s not so recent, having been building slowly for a while. What has happened is that the ethical/fair-trade movement has reached a level where it demands to be taken seriously. All sorts of factors have come together to cause the acceleration: concern about global warming, worry about oil running out, a backlash against the arms trade, the high profile accorded to Stop the City and G8 protests, fear about what goes into our food, increased awareness of working conditions in factories in Asia, alarm about the rise of the supermarkets and their treatment of suppliers ? the list goes on.

That has led to a new empowerment of shoppers, who now flex their influence to such a degree that marketing experts speak of the ?conscience consumer?. A survey by American Express found that 33 per cent of us categorise ourselves as caring, thinking shoppers. More importantly, that in turn has resulted in us believing, really for the first time, that we can make a difference. Last year?s Co-op survey on ethical spending found that 54 per cent of those questioned agreed with the statement: ?As a consumer, I can make a difference to how responsibly a company behaves.? Not only is this figure high ? more than half ? but, tellingly, it is much higher than the response to the same question the previous year. Then, the proportion agreeing was just 19 per cent.

So, as consumers rattle business, business responds; encouraged and emboldened consumers nudge a bit more, business bends further. And it?s not just high street customers but investors too are becoming aware of the issues. One that bothers them particularly is the extent to which consumers are willing to boycott companies and products when they disapprove of, say, the use of sweatshop labour. Last year more than ?3 billion was lost in sales due to boycott, just in Britain alone.

While this ethical products momentum appears unstoppable, it is far too early for campaigners to put away their placards and T-shirts. Business executives, by and large, are very simple people. It doesn?t pay them to get hung up on politics and social issues. They want to sell more of their products to make money for their companies, for the shareholders and for themselves. At the moment, ?ethical? is a growth area and companies seek growth, particularly when high street business is flat overall. If, for some reason, sales slowed, they would do an about-turn: out would go ?green? goods which are currently doing well and in would come whatever was showing greater promise.

Take Nestl?. It is no coincidence that Nestl? has decided to enter the fair trade market with Nescaf? Partners Blend coffee. Sales of conventional coffees are falling so it suits Nestl? to create a product aimed at the niche that is expanding.

The challenge the ethical/fair-trade lobby faces is to cross into the mainstream ? not only among consumers but within the mindset of big business.Having gained acceptability and recognition for the relatively small range of ethical products, the problems they face on this, the second stage of the campaign, are, if anything, more difficult. So far, even with their success, their impact has been tiny.

These companies have succeeded in persuading a middle-class section of society to put ethical concerns first. It?s significant, for instance, that Green & Black?s outstrips Dairy Milk in Waitrose. When it does the same in Asda and Morrison?s, then they will have genuine cause for celebration. For that to happen, they have to overcome resistance to price ? and companies would argue that price is a very good commercial reason why businesses behave unethically, why they use pesticides on their products, and why they pay such low hourly rates.

While the fair-trade lobby can hail Nestl??s fair-trade coffee as a breakthrough, there are those who question the company?s naivety. With its marketing clout and presence, Nestl? can swamp everything before it, if it chooses ? to the likely detriment of the small concerns who rely on fair trade for their lifeblood.

Already, fair-trade brands are feeling the pinch from supermarket own-label fair-trade products. Nestl??s move is not likely to help. Its product is going head to head with 107 other coffee products carrying the Fairtrade mark ? but there is no doubting which of them has more muscle. The Fairtrade Foundation, the organisation that hands down the Fairtrade award, maintains that Nescaf? Partners Blend will grow the fair-trade coffee market and won?t cannibalise existing sales. If I were one of the 107, I know how I would feel.

Teaming up with multinationals may look good on the lobbyist?s CV but there seems little point to it unless the company is prepared to make sweeping changes across the board. Just as ?ethical? and ?organic? are words that are confined to a small part of the supermarket or a narrow, upmarket band of specialist stores, so too are they ghettoised within the companies themselves.

Paul Chandler, chief executive of Traidcraft, acknowledges the problem: ?Big players coming into fair trade are not necessarily behaving ethically across 100 per cent of their supply chain, so it is important for consumers to understand that a company that has a fair-trade product is not the same as a company that is a fully fair-trade business.?

There is another body of opinion, which says that this underestimates both the ability of the consumer to make the distinction and the power of large corporations to capitalise on the blurring. This is the danger for the movement: that it fails to define exactly what it stands for, doesn?t convey that message to the public, and allows the corporates to ride its coat-tails ? to take what they want without offering much in return. Ethical, green, eco, organic, fair trade ? it?s all moving in the right direction and at a far faster pace than seemed possible a few years ago. What the lobby has to do now is, having come this far, to prevent big business from having its cake and eating it.

Chris Blackhurst is City Editor of London?s Evening Standard.