What is Fair Trade and How Does it Effect your Green Foot Print?

AFair trade certifiedround the world today, especially in developing countries, many men, women and children are breaking their backs to produce agricultural products and handicraft items at paltry daily wages, often just a dollar a day. Along the market chain from producer to consumer, the finished products are sold at prices ten times, even a hundred times, more than the wages paid to manufacture them.

Add in the hazardous working conditions and the damage wrought upon the environment by the manufacturing processes involved and you have a clear case of unfair trade practices. Fortunately, the concept of fair trade is gaining worldwide acceptance among producers and consumers.

Fair Trade Defined

Fair trade is the organized social movement that seeks to achieve a two-pronged objective. First, the implementation of fair trade practices can assist producers to attain a better quality of life through the payment of fair wages as well as the provision of opportunities for equal employment and advancement, financial and technical assistance, and safe working conditions.

Second, the appropriate application of fair trade principles promotes environmental sustainability through the use of eco-friendly manufacturing processes and practices. The environmental aspect is most often achieved through the safe handling and minimal use of agrochemicals, resource conservation especially in water and in land, control on deforestation, ban on genetically modified organisms, and soil management.

At present, the fair trade movement is strongest in imported products like handicrafts, cocoa, coffee, tea, sugar, chocolates, cotton, honey, wine, flowers and fresh fruits. As of 2007, there were only US$3.62 billion in fair trade certified sales. This is relatively small considering the volume of world trade but every little helps and your help ought to be counted.

Fair Trade and You

How does buying of a fair trade-certified product affect your comfortable life? Well, for one thing, you are a direct contributor to the betterment of someone elseís life in the developing countries where your coffee or tea came from.

In an indirect way, you have sent a boy/girl to school with each purchase you make. With education comes empowerment and so the cycle of human advancement at the personal level can begin with you.

For another thing, you promote environmentalism in your own little way. With the fair trade logo on your coffee, you have assurance that the land it was grown on was taken cared of the eco-friendly way.

The larger market forces may be beyond your control but, at the very least, you have the power over your wallet to determine the products you patronize. With fair trade-certified products, you are slowly but surely contributing to a worldwide movement to look after the rest of humanity and the environment.

Fair Trade and Your Wallet

Admittedly, fair trade-certified products can be pricier than the regular products. This is because the workers were paid the fair price for their services thereby raising the final prices on the finished products.

However, when you compare the environmental and human costs of non-fair trade products, you will realize that the price is definitely worth it in the long run. And then there is also the comforting thought that you are shaping the destiny of people half a world away and of the Earth that you pass on to your grandchildren.

Truly, fair trade provides justice and fairness to everybody concerned, from the littlest producer to the biggest consumer, but most important, to the planet Earth.