Is the fair trade a driver for the internationalization of less developed countries’ firms?

For the firms coming from less developed countries internationalization does not appear as an alternative but as a nec-essary choice, because the internal market is able to absorb only a minimal part of their production. Moreover, the firms that operate in underdeveloped countries often have not suitable market, organizational and financial compe-tences to implement complex entry modes so they prefer exporting to the foreign market with the intermediation of local trading company. Nevertheless, this mercantile way of internationalization makes the producers extremely vul-nerable because it limits their increasing of market knowledge and exposes them to counterpart‟s opportunistic behav-iors. Many authors have underlined that a solution of such producers‟ vulnerability could be the participation in alter-native trade networks like fair trade. According to these considerations, the aim of this paper is to analyze if the fair trade may change the internationalization process of the south producers and to define what are the conditions required to south world‟s producers in order to participate in fair trade network.