Fair Trade - It Makes a Difference!

Whether purchasing a fair trade shirt, fair trade coffee, tea or chocolate, each purchase makes a significant impact!

Fighting Poverty

Many of the developing worlds’ small farmers live in poverty, struggling to feed their families and to maintain ownership of their land. Hired workers are often denied basic employment rights and fair wages, unable to escape poverty no matter how hard they work. Fluctuations in world market prices often hit small producers the hardest because they don’t have the resources to absorb changes to their income that larger, industrial farms have. By joining together to create cooperatives, farmers are able to break this cycle and create safeguards for their own survival. Fair Trade Certified is a market-based model for alleviating global poverty—an alternative to dependency on aid—where farmers are given the tools to raise themselves out of poverty. Producers use premiums and revenue for social good in their communities, to help themselves and those around them.

Education

Impoverished farmers and workers often need their children to work in order to make enough to support the whole family. Fair Trade helps provide farming families with the income and stability they need to keep their children in school, instead of in the fields. From Nicaragua to India, farmer and worker associations have used Fair Trade funds to provide school supplies, pay for tuition and uniforms, set up scholarship programs, and finance free, healthy meals for children. Fair Trade revenues generated by the U.S. market have helped build schools and give the gift of education in some of the most historically isolated communities around the developing world.

Health Care

All around the world, small farmers and rural communities lack access to proper health care. Without proper medical care communities cannot thrive. Fair Trade standards require that farm workers and their families have access to doctors, medicine, proper nutrition, vaccinations and health education. Fair Trade farming cooperatives make decisions about what healthcare their communities need most, and many have elected to invest Fair Trade premiums into lifesaving health facilities and programs.