What is Fair Trade--and Why should we care?

Fair trade practices are those which harm neither people nor the planet. Take the bananas in my fruit bowl. That sticker certifies they were grown on a plantation that pays its workers a fair wage for their labor and does not exploit them.

The Fair Trade stamp at the bottom of the sticker tells me the plantation is inspected regularly and the owners must show they do not expose their workers to dangerous pesticides or other chemicals that could make them ill, even kill them. It also tells me the plantation does not pour pollutants into the streams, groundwater or air while growing and processing its fruit.

Why does this matter enough that I am willing to pay a premium for my bananas? Let me answer that with a question.

Could you bite into one more banana, knowing there is a strong possibility the workers who grew, harvested and processed it were as young as eight years old, worked twelve hour days, and were exposed to deadly toxins with little or no protection, that very likely, when they became too ill to work  they lost their jobs, could no longer contribute support to their families, and received no medical care because they had no health insurance?

I can not. I'm willing to pay a little more for bananas that bear the Whole Trade Guarantee or the Fair Trade Certified™ sticker because I know no human being was harmed just so I could have a ready supply of delectable fruit on the cheap.

The same goes for the tea, cocoa and coffee I drink, for the clothing I purchase, and for the toys I buy my grandchildren.

With fair trade, what we get are beautiful products that allow us to give back to the communities and strengthen them. ... Non-fair-trade products are just about the products.

Manish Gupta, founder of Handmade Expressions in
Fairwashing by Megy Karydes
New Age Retailer, July-August 2011

Every purchase matters

Every dollar spent is a vote

Every dollar we spend is a vote for clean air, safe water, worker well-being and health, or is it a vote for environmental degradation, sweat-shops, disease and, possibly, child slavery. The more I learn about how food and clothing are grown and manufactured overseas, the more important it becomes to buy products that are Fair Trade Certified™.

Take the shirt on your back. Was it made in a sweat shop? Did children as young as six or seven work fourteen or eighteen hours a day at below-subsistence wages to make it? Did the manufacturer dump toxins into China's or Malaysia's rivers, destroying fish and poisoning the men, women and children who live nearby?

How can you tell? If it bears a Fair Trade Certified™ label, chances are your t-shirt, socks, sneakers or sheets were manufactured with care for both the employees and the environment. That means no children worked in near slave conditions, and no toxins were dumped in nearby rivers or pumped into the groundwater after dark.

Every purchase matters. With the Fair Trade Certified label, you get quality products that improve lives and protect the environment. The money you spend on day-to-day goods can improve an entire community's day-to-day lives.

Fair Trade USA

Is FTC foolproof? No, but manufacuturers and producers must go through a rigorous and costly application process to assure they've met minimum standards. Take a look at the story behind Maggie's Organics. Now I admit, this 11-minute video has the earmarks of a marketing department production and leaves a few unanswered questions. Nevertheless, it tells a remarkable story, and I'm betting you'll be glad you watched it all the way to the end.

US consumers have access to about 7,000 Fair Trade Certified products, while worldwide, the number is 10,000. To find them all, try searching on this Fair Trade Federation page where you can search for member organizations by country and product type.

Additional resources

The following resources provide just about everything you might want to know about Fair Trade.

• Common myths and misconceptions about Fair Trade - Fair Trade Federation
• What is Fair Trade? - Green America 
• Principles for Fair Trade Federation Members - Fair Trade Federation
• Fair labor practices / Certified Fair Labor - Scientific Certification Systems
• Fair Trade products in the UK - Fair Trade UK
• Trace your coffee beans from farmer to producer - Fair Trade Proof

Should I grow faint myself at the thought of researching those links above next time I need a new turtleneck or pair of jeans, I need only return here and remind myself what is happening in factories like the two that produce H&M's clothing. Today, Ecouterre reporter Jasmin Malik Chua reported on the temporary closing of a Cambodian factory that manufactures clothing for H&M.

In her article, Hundreds of Cambodian Workers Sick in Mass Fainting at H&M Factory, Chua reports that officials attribute the fainting of 284 workers over two days to poor worker health. They closed the factory for a week so workers can rest, citing no "plausible cause." This despite the workers reporting a strong odor prior to fainting.

This is not an isolated incident. Chua cites a similar incident at another H&M factory in July. Then there was a case in April at a Puma factory. Puma hired the Fair Labor Association to look into it. Chua reports,

Following its analysis, which concluded that chemical exposure, poor ventilation, and exhaustion were “strong possibilities” for the spate of illnesses, Puma initiated a plan that limited work hours to 60 per week.

If the workers are now working only 60 hours per week, what the heck were they working prior to the incident? And what is being done to prevent chemical exposure going forward?

Why buy organic cotton? on Squidoo.

Excerpt: When I discovered that 25 percent of the world's pesticides--one-fourth!--go into growing just one crop, cotton, I was astonished. When I learned that those pesticides were killing the subsistence farmers and laborers growing the cotton, I started squirming on my sheets at night.

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Article copyright © L Kathryn Grace, August 2011, all rights reserved.