Fairly traded food – Blog Action Day 2011 (#BAD11)

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As Blog Action Day coincides with World Food Day this year, I’d like to highlight a topic well-known to us all but perhaps not present enough to us still: Fairly traded food. It has so many advantages and highlights common market food can’t offer us, plus it’ll help you sleep better at night as you know you’ve done a farmer in a less economically developed nation some good.

So what exactly is Fair Trade?

Most of our food is grown in the poorest and economically most unfair regions of the world. That goes not only for obviously exotic foods such as coffee bean, cocoa, or citrus fruit, but also for foods we consume on a daily basis. Hardly a pupil will not have heard of the slope between the rich, industrialized northern nations and the poor first-sector oriented South.

Due to the sparsely developed economy in equatorial regions, fairness was a foreign byword – until the Fairtrade Labelling Organizations International (FLO) were founded in 1997. They aim to buy products off farmers for higher prices than those of the global market and thus ensure the poorest of the poor reliable income high enough to cater for their families. Furthermore, fairly traded goods circumvent the middlemen that normally buy farmer’s goods – at extremely low prices, just to sell them for more and thus earn a comfortable living for themselves.

Fair Trade

What makes fairly traded products better?

As fairly traded products are far more expensive than the commonly known alternatives, there must be something special about them that has ensured their presence on the market for over a decade by now. Most people tend to buy fairly traded food for the sake of their conscience. Meanwhile the western world knows of the middlemen exploiting farmers and their families in poorer nations; thus we feel the need to help as much as we possibly can.

By buying fairly traded products, we enable farmers to take part in programmes that actually earn them a respectable income. Earning an average salary for their country of origin, most farmers who cater for our daily needs and luxury goods cannot even feed all their children and suffer from hunger themselves. Others say that most fairly traded goods actually taste better, which is not only due to our keeping a clean sheet. Luxury goods such as chocolate, tea, or coffee can be farmed according to ancient traditions and without use of harmful pesticides as farmers are earning an adequate salary to invest into their work.

Fairly traded goods often taste richer and more natural. And, which is another huge plus: They’re healthier as farmers can now afford to use pesticides free of toxins, provided they don’t drop them wholly and turn to organic farming for even tastier results.

(Image via Flickr: CC By)

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