Ethical Eating

Fair trade is all about helping the poorest and most vulnerable people in the world in places where minimum wages, healthcare, education and even running water aren’t accepted privileges.

- Janai Velez

Fair trade’s focus is the welfare of farmers and workers in developing countries and it aims to improve their working conditions and wages. These people are some of the planet’s most marginalised and disadvantaged. Locally, we can have a positive impact on their lives through the products we buy. Fair trade is fundamentally all about conscience and common sense.

WHY IS FAIR TRADE IMPORTANT?

The majority of our coffee, tea, cocoa and cotton are grown by poor people in developing countries, including parts of Africa, Asia and Latin America. Many of these farmers and workers are subject to low wages, poor working conditions, poverty and illegal child labour.

Fairtrade is an organisation that helps farmers and producers across more than 74 countries to ensure they have decent working conditions and are receiving reasonable prices for their products. It also helps them gain control of their lives.

As CEO of Fairtrade Australia and New Zealand Molly Harriss Olson explains, at its core, Fairtrade is about empowering communities.

“Fairtrade first started because there was a charity in Europe that was delivering wells to some coffee farmers in Mexico,” she says. “The coffee farmers were very grateful and they said, ‘Thank you so much. We really appreciate these wells but, you know, if you just paid a fair price for our coffee we could buy the wells ourselves.’

“That was kind of the profound ‘aha!’ that made Fairtrade come to life, because they realised that actually the best way to support and alleviate poverty was to enable farmers and workers around the world to have control of their future, to be able to manage their businesses and have access to trade in the fair way.”