Fair trade is a growing global movement. A huge and widening range of fair trade goods are now available in the shops. Why is fair trade so important? This book provides 50 reasons why buying fair trade delivers a host of benefits to people and the planet. It's an inspiring account of how every consumer can play a part in improving and even saving lives and making global trade work better for poor people.
Did you know that buying fair trade:
-- Helps eradicate sweatshops
-- Helps end child labour
-- Reduces the debt burden on developing countries' farmers
-- Ensures small-scale farmers can earn a living wage
-- Supports and protects the environment?
This book provides a critical guide to international trade and shows that fair trade presents a realistic and positive alternative for farmers and producers in developing countries. By improving schools, healthcare and working conditions, the fair trade movement has already saved lives and empowered whole communities. This book shows how every consumer can help make a difference in the fight to end poverty and inequality.
Foreword
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Back a system that benefits the poor
2. Pay small-scale growers a fairer price
3. Buy products you can trust
4. Help producers believe in tomorrow
5. Make trade more democratic
6. Put a human face on development
7. Ensure plantation workers earn a living wage
8. Empower women and girls
9. Enable people to eat
10. Save a cotton farmer's life
11. Be part of a growing global movement
12. Say Nuts! to unfair trade
13. Enjoy real quality, produced with pride
14. Send a child to school
15. Help make poverty history
16. Make your town a fair trade town
17. Shield small-scale growers from falling and erratic prices
18. Give someone's health a boost
19. Promote human rights
20. Free child carpet workers
21. Cut down the middlemen
22. Drink to a better world
23. Transform lives
24. Give bad balls the boot
25. Stamp out pesticide poisoning
26. Travel with respect
27. Support the environment [Be a friend of the Earth]
28. End child exploitation
29. Lift the debt burden
30. Say no to GMOs
31. Do something funky with your furniture
32. Rebuild lives and livelihoods
33. Make transnationals trade more fairly
34. Put paid to sweatshops
35. Buy into a longer-term relationship
36. Show solidarity with Palestinian farmers
37. Reach for the MDGs
38. Be a progressive coffee drinker
39. Help people overcome malnutrition
40. Co-operate with co-operatives
41. Prove the free-trade eggheads wrong
42. Make tomorrow's business happen today
43. Vote for trade justice
44. Enjoy that sweeter taste
45. Celebrate in March--and again in May!
46. Make markets really work for the poor
47. Invest in the future
48. Keep families and communities together
49. Defend diversity
50. Change the world!
Notes and sources
Appendix 1 Where to buy fair trade
Appendix 2 Fairtrade towns etc. in the UK
Appendix 3 Where to find out more
Index
