A Closer Look at Ethical Products: Introducing Fairtrade
Walk around your nearest branch of Morrissons, and you’re looking at the benefits of global market forces. You can purchase just about any item at a very low price. It might be bananas from Laos or rum from Venezuela – it’s in stock all year round. This is by far the best time in the history of humanity to be a shopper in the west. This has happened from just in time stock control, economies of scale, strong competitive forces, and possibly most influentially, the fact that many goods are sourced, and frequently made, in second and third world countries.
That final reason is rather substantive, and very controversial. While shoppers are enjoying food, drink, clothing and other items produced from second and third world nations at cheap cost, workers and business organizations in these manufacturing countries are often ripped off in the process, and haven’t any real sustainability as they’re at the end of a very long line of middle men who order what they manufacture, how much, and how often. This long string of middle men all require their pay too – in the end there’s not much money for the end-of-line producer.
Still, there’s help for such desperate individuals and companies. Fairtrade is a cause that looks to empower such end-producing business organizations in the poorer nations of the world. It attempts to get rid of the middlemen, and renumerate the end-producer a reasonable price for a product in a much more targeted way. You might have seen Fairtrade products in your nearest supermarket. Sometimes they’re a tad more costly, but by buying such ethical products or even ethical gifts – for instance fair trade baby clothes – you will be happy to realise the manufacturer is working in a sustainable way that doesn’t just pay them fairly through a much more direct revenue flow, but it also grants them to put this extra money into their business through higher earnings, which genuinely makes a difference to these poorer parts of the planet.
