All the Latest: Fair Trade in the News

There’s lots happening in the world, with info coming at you from all angles. Here’s an overview of a few interesting articles we found lately from the fair trade world, to keep you updated!

Finance Innovation: The Next Frontier in Fair Trade Supply Chains

(via Triple Pundit – 01/28/16)

As demand for fair trade products increases, the scaling of their supply chains can be difficult. Small-scale fair trade farms don’t always have access to local banks that specialize in small business loans, and they can’t afford the generally higher interest rates that go along with them. They need capital expenditure loans for things like buying and setting up new equipment so that they can no only grow the products, but process them too, allowing them to get more value out of the product before they send it abroad. More value from the products means the famers can improve their community’s standard of living much faster and potentially expand their market.

Fair trade brands like Dr. Bronner’s and Guayaki Yerba Mate considered this problem and found a solution in providing the capital to the farms themselves or working with capital investors directly on behalf of their supplier farms. This new approach is based not on  the traditional model of risk vs. reward, but on trust and community relationships, with the investors becoming part of that global community.

Is There Child Labor in Your Chocolate?

(via HuffPoste Taste – 02/09/16)

Americans eat 58 million pounds of chocolate in the weeks leading up to Valentine’s Day. That is a huge amount of chocolate, a product associated with love, happiness and smiles. But what’s the cost for the farmers who harvest that chocolate?

70% of all cocoa comes from West Africa, in countries like Ghana and Ivory Coast, where farmers earn as little as $0.25-$0.50 per day. Low cocoa yields and low cocoa prices lead to farmers employing their children, just so their family can get by. Access to education is limited and schools often don’t have proper teachers or supplies so there is little incentive to send children to school and hardly any government enforcement to make sure they go. Today, more than 2 million children work in the chocolate industry in West Africa. Purchasing fair trade chocolate ensures children get to go to school, play like children and don’t have to do hazardous work.

End Fast Fashion

(via Zady)

The Slow Fashion Movement is just beginning to gain traction, and like it’s counterpart, Slow Food, it’s all about education. The slow food movement teaches people that sustainable, nutritious food grown near where they live is not only better for the environment, but better for their health. People can understand this pretty quickly and can easily see the true effects on their bodies. The slow fashion movement is harder to explain to people, and the results are less obvious to consumers. And yet, the potential effects are far reaching, to the millions of people working across the globe in the ever-expanding fast fashion food chain.

Fast fashion reinforces the idea that clothing should be as disposable as the shopping bag we put it in. Quantity over quality. Americans throw away 68 pounds of clothing per person every year, each piece requiring tremendous amounts of resources to create. A tee shirt requires 700 gallons of water to make. Like the slow food movement, once you know where the things you consume come from and the true cost of making them, it’s hard to go back. Most people want to know more, and want to act on that knowledge to buy things that reflect their values.