The goal of fair trade is to keep farmers and workers in developing nations from being exploited as a result of globalization, and to enjoy reasonable wages and working conditions. Social enterprises with this focus are developing fastest in Taiwan.

When Öko­green, Taiwan’s first fair-trade coffee house, was established in 2007, it offered Taiwan its first look at fair-trade businesses. In a short time the company went from being purely a coffee shop to being an importer and dealer of coffee beans. In 2011 it founded Fair­trade Taiwan, with the idea of expanding the market for fair-trade companies by advocating for new consumer ideals. The company’s founders, husband and wife Xu Wen­yan and Yu ­Wanru, are the classic “missionary type” of social ­entrepreneurs.

Thus far, the two of their ideas that have been best received are “brewing coffee at home” and “using fair-trade coffee for the office coffeepot.” If consumers can brew coffee themselves at home, their social awareness can shape their consumer habits. Office coffeepots are a standard expense for most offices. Consuming a startling amount of coffee every day, they represent an excellent place for fair-trade coffee dealers to establish a foothold. Twenty-two companies have already committed to using fair-trade coffee in their office pots. The potential is enormous.

Taiwan’s agricultural co-ops helped to provide a sturdy foundation for Taiwan’s postwar economic miracle. They combine many things: labor, cooperative farming, production, sales and so forth. For Taiwanese society, they have kept the culture and practice of small-scale farming alive, and they are now serving as the greatest force for organic farming during this wave of social enterprise creation in Taiwan.

The documentary film Let It Be raised the profile of the Fang­rong Rice Mill for bringing together organic farmers in Tai­nan City’s ­Houbi District. Not only have these efforts burnished the image of the 80-year-old mill, ushering in a second spring, but the revival has extended to neighboring businesses, breathing new life into the area’s leisure resources and turning ­Houbi into a major tourist draw.

Kao­hsiung’s Xiao­lin and Jia­xian communities, which were devastated by Typhoon Mo­ra­kot in 2009, are now seeing the formation of many production and sales co-ops. They are taking active steps to rise from the ruins of natural disaster.

In a time of overall print-media decline, Taiwan’s public-interest media have been on the rise. Since 2006 the monthly Bao Bon ­Phuong has released Vietnamese, Thai, Indonesian, Tagalog, and Cambodian editions one after another. These serve immigrants and guest workers from Southeast Asia. They have a combined press run of 50,000. Although the target audiences are minority groups that are small in number, there is a strong demand among them for what the paper offers. Readership has steadily increased, and the paper can even afford the high fees necessary to be offered at convenience-store news racks. Every time Bao Bon ­Phuong has released a new language edition, it has quickly reached break-even point, and the new revenues have gone toward starting up the next language edition.

The Vietnamese edition of the paper has a press run of over 20,000, but Taiwan only has about 200,000 Vietnamese. That’s a remarkable level of market penetration, with one paper for every ten Vietnamese readers.

There are more than 100 public interest groups in Taiwan working hard to achieve financial self-sufficiency. Chou Wen-chen, the executive director of the Bjør­gaas Social Welfare Foundation, analyzes that with assistance from the Council of Labor Affairs, public interest organizations can use the revenue they receive from their sheltered employment facilities to help cover their operating costs. What’s more, they have created employment opportunities for mentally and physically disabled groups, and their products may even be more competitive than products produced by regular for-profit business.

The most successful example is the Victory Potential Development Center for the Disabled. The center prepares the disadvantaged, in accordance with their job capabilities, to work at various job sites, including data entry centers, gas stations, digital printing centers, bakeries and so forth. The services they provide are competitive in their own right and need no special marketing. The caramel puddings disabled bakers make for Mr. Nordic, for instance, are hugely popular. Many customers don’t even realize these puddings come from a sheltered employment bakery.

The Victory Center’s successful model has bolstered the morale of other non-profit organizations. Among them, the cleaning services offered by the First Social Welfare Foundation have earned annual revenues surpassing NT$100 million. Now that’s a vote of confidence!

With citizen activism flourishing in Taiwan in recent years, it has given rise to special opportunities for “cultural and creative products” focused on social and political movements. For instance, towels and T-shirts with anti-nuclear slogans have been sold online and at demonstrations. Item sales have easily reached the tens of thousands, with impressive profits.

Wu ­Chung-shen, chair of the sociology department at Fu Jen Catholic University, explains that “movement products” are invested with symbolic meaning to members of the movement, and their price can be set at many multiples of their cost, with the profits being poured back to support movement organizations. This is very much a social enterprise model. Yet these products calling for justice, like the appeals made by social movements, must be judged by society, and the flow of profits from them will be closely scrutinized.

In addition to the five trends described above, other kinds of social enterprise whose development is worth watching include restoration ­agriculture, knowledge forums, transformations of traditional businesses, and cultural and ­creative products produced by disabled people.

Social enterprises aim to help resolve social problems by meeting various small needs. They have given many idealistic youths, people with small demands for material success but big dreams about achieving social impact, hope that there is a model of employment that suits them well. As a consequence, they may end up transforming Taiwan’s current industrial model of producing on a large scale for export.