Posts filed under ‘Fair Trade Helps People’
How Collaboration Creates Fair Trade from Farm-to-Shelf
Hi Guys,
Liz here. I stumbled upon this series of posts on TriplePundit.com. Apparently they’re doing a 3-part series on Fair Trade. Very interesting if you ask me – it hits home. Remember those food & fair trade posts some time back? Well, this one from February at least is geared along the same lines. I think it does a good job painting the full picture.
The idea is that we often are so short-term focused that we cannot see how our actions are affecting the future. The mentality happens everywhere. Here’s a quote from the article. See how real it is: “Look no further than the cocoa industry. For decades, cocoa farmers have not made enough money to feed their families. Most cocoa farmers don’t know what a chocolate bar looks like. They get a tiny tiny, tiny fraction of the value of that end product. If you can’t feed your family, and you can’t send your kids to school, do you think you’re going to invest in sustainable farming techniques or quality improvements or productivity improvements? Without these changes, its only a matter of time before there is a shortage of cocoa. So the industry has woken up to the fact that they have to invest in the people and the planet if they want to stay in business. And that’s why you see major cocoa companies saying, ‘You know what? We need to invest in certified cocoa.’”
Make sense? Intense unmet needs often hinder us from seeing.
On a parallel note, someone here was recently asking how fair trade provided better education for workers’ children. The article only touches on education and fair trade, but it makes a great point by connecting them together. The answer is a bit complicated, but as mentioned above, part of this sustainability thing is getting everyone to be a little better off . For many artisans, their livelihoods depend on their crops (this is called sustenance farming), and income from fair trade is income they otherwise wouldn’t have. So sometimes, that extra income is what keeps kids from working and instead going to school. Sometimes it’s what allows the family resources to send their kids to school (maybe money for transportation or supplies) or to a better school. For most of the artists we work with, we continually hear that our artist partners use income from our work to send their kids to better schools, sometimes even to university. How can people pursue education when they don’t have money for food? for clothing? How can they prepare for the future when there is so much need in the present?
That’s what we hope to do. That’s what we strive to do. To provide for the immediate and future needs of those families, those communities. To make the world a little more beautiful one fair trade product at a time.
You can read the full article at TriplePundit here. I hope you glean something from it.
And sorry guys, I feel like i couldn’t’ tie this post together as well as I would have liked. But I hope you take something good away from it!
Fair Trade Can Win You a trip to Peru!
Hi Fair Trade Friends!
The Fair World Project just put out this nice video on fair trade and a chance to win a trip to Peru! Check it out! And check out all those great sponsors! cheers! ~Liz
A little fair trade fashion story
Hey friends… it seems i am at my usual i-should-have-posted-something-way-before-now faze, and yet I haven’t had much time to meditate on what i would share. I did, however, happen upon this neat little article about Chicago’s fair trade fashion profile. Seems they’re up to something good.
One city at a time, guys. One city at a time.
Here’s the article so you can see just what’s possible when like-minds get together. Happy reading!
Oh, and if i may… try browsing these FT fashionista’s websites. If you see something you like, Pin it! Let the whole world know how cool fair trade fashion can be. Cheers until next time!
