Why Buy Fair Trade Products?

We’ve all heard of sweat shop laborers, often children, working 16-hour days just to eat. Meantime, executive salaries of American corporations have skyrocketed 400% since 1970. With multiple homes, yachts, and exorbitant expense accounts, these executives are living a life of luxury on the backs of impoverished families.

When you purchase a fair trade product, you're taking action to change all that. Your fair trade purchase delivers a greater share of the profits to those that worked hard to earn them—the growers, harvesters and artisans of developing countries around the world. It helps workers feed their families, send their children to school and reinvest in their communities and businesses. It improves education, democracy and transparency in the workplace, allowing workers to join in decisions and become stakeholders in their businesses.

When you buy fair trade products, you promote environmental stewardship in the developing world. Fair trade status bans GMOs, limits agrochemical use and requires sustainable practices such as soil management and water conservation.

Furthermore, fair trade certifiers educate producers about sustainability and encourage and aid them to gain organic certification.

Every time you choose a fair trade company, you personally help create a future where workers are respected and paid a living wage, no child is forced into labor, women are treated as equals and the environment is taken into account.

In a global economy, richer countries have been able to take advantage of the poor—but the fair trade movement gives them control of their products and profits.

What better way to celebrate Mothers Day than to give the gift of fair trade to a mother and her children in the developing world?