World Fair Trade Day

The second Saturday of every May is World Fair Trade Day. The World Fair Trade Organisation says,

It is an inclusive worldwide festival of events celebrating Fair Trade as a tangible contribution to the fight against poverty and exploitation, climate change and the economic crisis that has the greatest impact on the world’s most vulnerable populations.

There are numerous stories about where and when Fair Trade started but from the late 1940s on, across the USA, the UK and Europe, conscious choices were made by individuals and groups to support groups in need by trading with them. Whether that was women in Puerto Rico selling needlework or Chinese refugees selling handicrafts, there was an understanding that trade - not just aid - was a powerful driver for helping people to lift themselves out of poverty.

Wherever it started, Fair Trade is now a well known and powerful movement. It's not without it's controversies but we all here believe in the words on the front of every Big Issue magazine - a hand up not a hand out. There is no 'they' 'over there' who are happier than we would be to receive charity and exist on it - we all want to earn our own money, pay our own way and be beholden to no-one.

As far as we can, we live what we believe here and our kitchen has Clipper Tea and Cafe Direct coffee in it - we also buy Divine Chocolate bars and hot chocolate but neither last very long!

I'm aware I'm speaking for myself here not us as a business, but something I believe very hard is that if you want to make change happen you have to make it easy. If you make it hard, or complex, or leave people feeling hard done by, they won't come with you. Overwhelming people by saying they have to make tons of huge changes is more likely to mean they just tune out and make none. We all have competing responsibilities and priorities and when it comes to deciding what to have for dinner or which clothes to buy, the ethics of that might be way down the list on a tired day as you drag yourself around the shops worrying about something else.

This is why our Pants are beautiful, hopefully easy to buy and we try to be as accessible to you as we can through our social media even though we have no actual shop for you to come to. We try to make it easy for you to make a cheerful choice that we think is good.

Making it easy is the genius of Fair Trade addressing the food industry, starting with staple products. If the Fair Trade Coffee is next to the regular stuff in the supermarket (or is the only stuff on the shelves in your local independent bookshop that sells coffee and tea and shampoo - hi October Books!) it is easy to grab it and make that positive choice. No detour, nothing given up or gone without. And the glory then is that we see things like supermarkets saying that the only bananas they will sell are far trade. Small changes and actions do add up - don;t stop making them just because you can't do everything.

Whatever you're up to this World Fair Trade day, maybe you could try a new fair Trade something that you've not tried before. We have a weakness for this and a hankering to try this .

Maybe we'll just pop to the shops...