Not all fair-trade certification labels are created equal, according to a new report by the Fair World Project (FWP). The report breaks down the various definitions of the most common fair-trade certifications, and the role verification programs play in the global fair trade movement.

“Fairness for Farmers: A Report Assessing the Fair Trade Movement and the Role of Certification,” identifies the fundamental differences between six fair trade product labels. It also emphasizes the importance of purchasing fair-trade certified products to ensure farmer fairness and to combat power imbalances often seen within global supply chains.

Small-scale farmers face many threats including land grabbing, unfair trade agreements, lack of government and technical support, low and volatile prices, uneven wealth distribution, corporate control of the food system, and climate change.

Global trade favors those already in power—businesses, governments, and the largest players at any stage of the supply chain whether large-scale farms, factory owners, or mega-corporations. In conventional supply chains, producers—the bottom of the chain—generally lack negotiating power and small-scale producers are further marginalized within the production sector since they are competing against bigger and better-resourced producers.

A mighty band of citizen activists, along with the Nebraska Farmers Union, are taking on a city council and a corporate giant. And they need your help.

Retail giant Costco wants to build the largest chicken factory farm in the U.S., in Fremont, Nebraska. The city’s elected officials have approved the project. But the people and farmers in surrounding cities, whose lives will suffer the most, are fighting back.

Costco and the Fremont City Council are singing the same old tired tune, that a giant factory farm will bring jobs to the city.

What they don’t want Fremont residents to know, is that those jobs will be low-paid and dangerous, that the water pollution generated from another huge factory farm will be devastating for Nebraskans, whose water is already badly compromised by agricultural runoff, and that local farmers will get ripped off under contracts stacked in favor of the retail giant.

We’re so impressed with what Nebraska Communities United is doing to stop this project—including organizing workshops to help local farmers farm profitably, sustainably and independent of corporate control, that we’re asking for your help.

Tonight, the World Food Prize will be ceremoniously bestowed on yet another cheerleader for degenerative agriculture.

In the lead-up to World Food Day (October 16) and tonight’s ceremony, I’ve received, from an enthusiastic marketing person who mistakenly thinks I’d be interested in attending tonight’s events, a series of emails all with the subject line “How Iowa is feeding the world.”

The email invitations contain glowing praise for industrial, degenerative agriculture—the type that kills healthy soil life, has ruined Iowa’s water and produces pesticide-contaminated food.

The farmers and “thinkers, scientists and advocates of global food security” who are gathered in Des Moines this week aren’t interested in regenerative agriculture. And, as one new report after another reveal, the only thing they’re feeding the world is a slick PR campaign, founded in lies.