Fair Trade

For one of our weekly forums, I arranged for a speaker to come from Equal Exchange to discuss the topic of Fair Trade in our world. I did this in anticipation of a Fair Trade Fair I'm arranging on campus which will be the week after Thanksgiving. I'm excited for the things I ordered and also for what other vendors are bringing. That aside, I found the information our speaker shared to be highly insightful. And as a consumer, I find an inner debate constantly taking place in the products I buy. Yes, I want to buy products that are fairly traded because then it means the workers might actually be receiving a living wages, it supports local business/farmers, and hopefully allows for stronger economies to be built in suffering countries. But what I discovered today, is that is not necessarily what is happening.

At the store a person can find 'Fair Trade' products many places. But what does that really mean? Do Starbucks and Wal-Mart really carry Fair Trade products? What do you think? Well, the answer is yes, both large, multi-million dollars industries carry Fair Trade. Great, right? Not exactly. What this means is that a small percentage of the products (sometimes as little as 1%) are purchased fairly traded so they are able to put on a good face for the consumer. The reason they are willing to buy Fair Trade, which is not as profitable, is due to the fact that they're using subsidies from their other products to fund the Fair Trade ones.

I think this is a real problem. One possible solution our presenter shared was having some sort of percentage mandate on much of a companies sales are Fair Trade if they really want to present themselves as ethical companies paying living wages to farmers. Another suggestion: since Fair Trade products are generally more expensive, thus excluded part of the population, grocers should raise prices of all their products. Before you're quick to negate that option, hear me out. The low prices that we pay for groceries barely pays for the workers that are harvesting, packing, producing, and transporting our food. Most of the money is in the hands of the brokers. So, if grocers charged a higher price, they would thus be saying they care about the farmer and their living wage. A follow-up concern to this of course is, "I can no longer afford to buy groceries because they're expensive." Perhaps this would force us to take a look at another pressing issue: a liveable wage. If people aren't able to pay for their groceries, then there's something to be said about how the society isn't supporting them? Or, perhaps we're importing too many of our products. I understand that MN is not sustainable in growing bananas and other common foods we like to have, like coffee. However, why can't a bulk of our produce come from small, local agricultural communities? If this happened, it would also cut down on fuel cost/CO2 emission from shipping products across the globe as well. All of these things, rest on the fact that some large companies would actually take the time to think about people and what might be best for communities. I'm not saying it can't happen, but it's and upward climb from where we're at.