Vietnam-Quilts would maybe not make profits if there were no volunteers to help in sales and marketing. Viêt Nam Plus has supported Vietnam-Quilts by buying its products for several years at a loss. Still today Viêt Nam Plus supports the quilters groups for their management -they handle a lot of money and are poorly educated. Vietnam-Quilts functions well as it is based on a community development program in the same villages.

Some customers say: "These quilts are fantastic, do you export as well?" Very little. A quilt priced at 100 euros in saigon generates a comfortable margin (which goes back to the villages to fund scholarships etc.), must be sold at more than 500 euros in Western countries to cover the heavy overheads. Certain fair rade networks adopt strategies which look quite similar to normal trade practices (insist on lower prices and discounts, reduce the number of suppliers...) who leave a very small share to the producers in the third world. Some say quite bluntly: "You are too expensive, the Indians are cheaper". Prices must be lowered in Vietnam, to cover the high costs in the modern countries: from the producer to the ultimate customer the price is multiplied by 10.

Terre d'Oc was looking for a fair trade supplier. Viêt Nam Plus received an email from this still unknown company but immediately responded positively, organized a field visit. Terre d'Oc became interested because of the well established community development programs of Thiên Chí, the Vietnamese NGO partner of Viêt Nam Plus. Thiên Chí is the local operator for this program, advances the money to buy the raw materials, does the quality control, monitors the production and organizes logistics thanks to its plurilingual team. Clearly, not every small producer could access an excellent client like Terre d'Oc.

It was a lot more difficult with FLO -the Fair Trade Label Organization which certifies fair trade suppliers and traders. This certification would have been quite impossible to get for the same cooperative of Dúc Phú: all documents are in English which no ones understands. The process is extremely expensive: 2500 €, you must have a bank account in foreign currency for the transfer, the proper documents required by the bank bureaucracy. After 6 months of intense exchanges by email and phone, FLO finally sent an expert to investigate the cooperative. But it took 4 months for its report to lead to a decision, well after the yearly harvest! Without a local support like a local NGO, the cooperative would not have even tried.

Fair trade is thus an important part of the solution, but requires many other forms of support to function properly.