Why Buy Fair Trade and Fairly Traded Goods?

Next time you're Target or WalMart or the Gap, your local university pep store, check the tags for the country of manufacture for the items they're selling: China, Thailand, Honduras, Haiti, Indonesia, Vietnam, Mexico and more - many countries notorious for their brutal treatment of workers. Fair Trade Certified goods are helping to change these trends.

When we buy Fair Trade, We Make a Difference

Fair Trade Certified means the supply chain follows strict standards to help workers and farmers get solid economic footing in the global economy. Fair Trade Certification ensures, among other things, the workers in the factories making the clothes, shoes or toys or the farmers in the fields are working in fair and safe environments.

Fair Trade Means Fair Wages and Fair Prices

Fair Trade typically means workers and farmers are paid a fair price for their work, without extra fees or withheld paychecks typical of many sweatshop rip-offs. The fair price for all workers around the world is a living wage (one that a person can actually survive with).

Fair Labor - an Important Element in Fair Trade

Buying fair trade goods helps workers and farmers around the world to engage their own economic destiny.

Fair Trade ensures workers enjoy fair labor condidions, including freedom of association, safe working environment, and prohibits child labor. Fair Trade is also imported on a more personal and one-to-one model with less middlemen and more power to the farmers, and craftspeople.

Among the free association required to be Fair Trade Certified is the right of workers to organize and in fact only deals with farmers and workers who democratically decide how the business is run and where the revenues go.

Fair Trade Helps Communities

Fair Trade producers and farmers also stimulate community projects to distribute more knowledge and skill to the communities. Buying Fair Trade coffee, shoes, clothes or other products manufactured as Fair Trade Certified will help workers and farmers in many ways, and as we continue to support this market, more workers and farmers will be able to participate in Fair Trade.