Fair Trade: Making Life Fair for Farmers
Fair Trade: Making life fair for farmers
Life isn’t always fair. While not the most optimistic statement, it is certainly true. But what if you could make life fair for more people just by the products you choose? Well, you can.
Buying Fair Trade ensures that you’re getting quality products and the people who grow, sew and craft them get a fair deal for their hard work. In fact, your everyday purchases can help farmers and factory workers in 70 countries work in safe conditions, earn extra money to invest in their communities and improve the lives of their families. Here’s how Fair Trade helps.
Fair Trade helps farmers. The chocolate we love so much comes from cacao farms in developing countries. Billions of small-scale farmers in the developing world live on less than $2 a day. They struggle to feed their families, send their kids to school and keep their land. Fair Trade gives farmers support and resources to lift themselves out of poverty and invest in their communities.
Fair Trade helps our planet. Farmers who struggle to make a living are often forced to engage in farming practices that compromise local ecosystems. Fair Trade farmers adhere to strict environmental standards, and higher prices for their products enable them to invest in sustainability and help preserve the land for generations to come.
Fair Trade helps children. Globally, almost 100 million children ages 5 through 17 work in agriculture. Fair Trade prohibits child labor, and farms often invest their Fair Trade premiums to keep children out of the fields and in school. There are 123 million illiterate youth worldwide. Many Fair Trade Certified farms and factories use their community development premiums to build schools, purchase school supplies and fund scholarship programs that benefit young students.
Fair Trade helps women. Women do much of the work on small farms, large estate and in factories. They often face discrimination and harassment. Fair Trade combats these issues and empowers women through opportunities for education, leadership roles and equal representation on workers’ committees.
Good practices and good products go hand in hand. A growing number of farmers, factories, businesses and consumers are seeing how investing in people best secures the future of the products and the planet we love. When you purchase Fair Trade certified products you help to improve lives and protect the environment. You can find a list of Fair Trade certified products here.
Now doesn’t that make that chocolate taste even better?
