LONDON – Historically, the term fair trade has meant many things. The Fair Trade League was founded in Britain in 1881 to restrict imports from foreign countries. In the United States, businesses and labor unions use fair trade laws to construct what economist Joseph Stiglitz calls barbed-wire barriers to imports. These so called anti-dumping laws allow a company that suspects a foreign rival of selling a product below cost to request that the government impose special tariffs to protect it from unfair competition.