CHAPTER FOUR

Making Change

The final part of the fair trade supply chain is the buyers. That’s you and me!

Changing the World

Check the labels of your clothes to see how many places you are connected to. BROOKE BECKER/SHUTTERSTOCK.COM

How many people in the world are you connected to? It’s hard to answer that question, but one way to do it is to take a look inside your closet. Most clothing labels indicate where the item is made. What story do your clothes tell you? If you could put pins in a map of the world to show all the places your clothing comes from, how many pins would there be?

I teach at a college, and at the beginning of every school year I like to buy one or two new pieces of clothing. It feels good to start the year with a new shirt or sweater. If you need new clothes because you’ve grown and there isn’t anything in your family’s closets that fits you, take a look and see if there is a place nearby or online where you can buy fair trade clothing. Sometimes it is a bit more expensive, but it’s worth it to know you have helped someone have a better life!

Fair trade goods from Uganda, brought back directly from the makers to Victoria, BC. JOANNE SPECHT

Pssst…Pass It On

Colorful baskets brighten up store shelves. JOANNE SPECHT

Once you’ve found a place to buy your new fair trade clothes, take a picture of them or of the shop. Ask your parents if you can post it on social media for your friends to see. Maybe they will be inspired to buy fair trade clothing too.

Spreading the word is an important way to help the fair trade movement grow, and there are many ways to do it. You could create a fair trade float for a local parade or set up a fair trade stall at your local market. You could write a paragraph about fair trade in your school newsletter or create a fair trade poster to hang up in your classroom. One group of high school kids in Montclair, New Jersey, started a fair trade caroling group at Christmas. Yes, they were singing for fair trade. Instead of wishing everyone a Merry Christmas, they wished them a Fair Trade Christmas. Passersby heard the songs and stopped to ask questions. The kids were able to spread the word about fair trade—and have fun doing it.

Finding Fairness

Different fair trade organizations have different labels, but they all have the words fair trade on them. FAIRTRADE CANADA

Fair trade organizations make it easy to recognize when you are buying fair trade products. They put labels on clothes, food and anything else they are selling to tell us that the product we are about to buy has been recognized as being fairly traded. Look for these logos to help guide you in your shopping. You can also get fair trade stickers from shops like Ten Thousand Villages or other fair trade stores in your town and attach them to your backpack or bike or skateboard. That’s another way to let other people know about fair trade.

FAIR TRADE FACT: Grocery stores in North America sell more bananas than any other fruit.

Cupcakes for Sale!

Avery Jane makes her own skin and hair products using fair trade items. JULIE PAUL

There are a lot of ways you can make your own household more fair trade–friendly. Avery Jane from Victoria, British Columbia, has always been crafty. When she was ten, she started making her own hair and skin creams. She and her mom bought fair trade Shea butter, beeswax and cocoa butter, and she mixed them together, added tangerine, lavender and vanilla scents to make them smell lovely, and created her own homemade creams. “I wanted to find fair trade products because I wanted to make sure other people weren’t suffering,” she says.

Now that Avery is a teenager, she also makes yummy cupcakes using fair trade cocoa and coconut oil along with her other ingredients. If you like to bake or do crafts, you can look through your ingredients list to see if there is anything that you could buy fair trade.

Do you ever have bake sales to raise money for sports events or field trips? Ask families who are baking if they can include one or two fair trade ingredients in their baked goods. And if your family goes to a potluck dinner, you might be able to add fair trade ingredients to the food that you take.

Holidays and Summer Fun

Look for fair trade ingredients in the baking section of your local grocery store. JENS LANGEN/DIVINE CHOCOLATE/TENTHOUSANDVILLAGES.COM

There are so many ways you can use fair trade products in your everyday life. Do you like to camp? There’s nothing so wonderful as food cooked over an open fire, especially s’mores, which are made by squishing marshmallows and chocolate between graham crackers and roasting them over the fire. The more chocolate the better, and if it’s fair trade chocolate, that’s the best.

Chocolate is one of the easiest treats to buy fair trade, and one of the yummiest too. In North America we eat a lot of chocolate, especially at Easter. In fact, in North America, people buy more chocolate at Easter than at any other time of year. Does your family or school or church hold an Easter egg hunt? If they do, ask them to use fair trade Easter eggs. (And if they don’t have an Easter egg hunt, now’s a great time to start. More chocolate for you!) If you celebrate Passover, you can include a wish to end slavery and child labor in cocoa farming as part of your Passover Seder Haggadah. The organization Global Exchange even has a Passover Seder Haggadah insert to help.

About 40 percent of the world’s sugar is made from sugar cane, mostly from Fiji, Belize, Paraguay, Mauritius and Jamaica. LEVEL GROUND TRADING

Easter and Passover aren’t the only holidays when you can make fair trade choices. At Halloween you can ask your parents to help you make treats from fair trade chocolate and sugar to hand out, and on Valentine’s Day your classmates or teacher might like the same treats. Any time you and your family share feasts and treats, try to include some fair trade products.

In My Basket

These are some of the fair trade foods that I found in my pantry. KARI JONES

One day when I went grocery shopping, I tried an experiment. Every time I put something in my cart, I looked at where it came from and whether it was fair trade. I was surprised at how many items in my cart came from faraway places like Chile and Israel and India. Not much of my shopping was fair trade, so I decided that each time I shopped, I would try to replace one item with a fair trade equivalent. So far it’s going well. I’ve found fair trade bananas and rice, but I’m still looking for fair trade mangoes.

It’s a Challenge

In 2016, the Girl Guides of the Prairie Rose area of Alberta held a chocolate challenge to learn all about fair trade chocolate. First, they talked about where chocolate comes from and who makes it. They learned why it’s important to buy fair trade chocolate and what logos to look for when they’re choosing their chocolate treats. Then they played games like Chocolate Bingo, and finally they made and ate chocolate treats. Now that’s what I call a great challenge.

If you belong to a club or sports team, or if your family belongs to a church, temple or mosque, ask your leaders if you can have a “fair trade day.” People would learn all about fair trade and play games, just like the Girl Guides in Alberta.

Fair Trade Schools

Ninety percent of the world's cocoa is grown on small family farms by about six million farmers, so buying fair trade cocoa has a big impact. HAAK78/SHUTTERSTOCK.COM

Schools across North America and Europe are going fair trade. That means they have clubs that encourage students and their families to learn about fair trade. They also strive to use fair trade ingredients in their cafeterias and bake sales.

Media Elementary School in Pennsylvania was one of the first in the United States to become a fair trade school. They started with students in the grade five class, who decided to become cocoa farmers for a day and learn what it’s like to grow cocoa. The class saw how hard the farmers work and decided they wanted to do something to help those farmers out.They started a fair trade club, and when their school has a bake sale now, they use at least two fair trade ingredients in their baking. That way everybody remembers the people who grow the spices and sugars we use in our baking. (Plus everyone gets to eat chocolate. That’s always a good thing.)

Dressing up as a giant banana is one way to raise awareness of fair trade! FAIRTRADE CANADA

Any school can have a fair trade club. In England, over 1,000 schools have joined the Fairtrade Foundation, and all the kids are learning about their fair trade breakfast. Each school will organize a breakfast where everyone eats fair trade food. Just imagine if they all eat fair trade bananas. That’s a whole lot of banana peels! I hope nobody slips.

A fair trade club at your school can do a lot of things. Does your school have a cafeteria, and does it sell fair trade food? If it doesn’t, do some research and find out what fair trade food is available in your town that could be sold in the cafeteria.

If you’re interested in making your school a fair trade school, ask a teacher to help you contact www.fairtradecampaigns.org for support.

FAIR TRADE FACT: In Ivory Coast (where 72 percent of the world’s chocolate comes from), up to 200,000 children work, many of them in cacao production.

In My Basket

Labels on the clothing in my cupboard. KARI JONES

One day when I was putting away the laundry, I noticed a tag at the back of one of my shirts. It said Made in Mexico. That made me wonder, Where does the rest of my clothing come from? I dug around in my cupboards for a while, and this is the list I came up with. My family’s clothing is made in India, China, Mexico, Thailand, Honduras, Taiwan, Dominican Republic, Portugal, Bangladesh, Guatemala, Vietnam, El Salvador, Haiti, Indonesia, Philippines, Hong Kong, Ecuador, Romania, Canada and the United States. We’re linked to a lot of people around the world, but how many of them are treated fairly?

Hear Ye, Hear Ye!

The best way to get local stores to sell fair trade products is to ask the owners to carry them. TATJANA SPLICHAL/SHUTTERSTOCK.COM

Any group of people can go fair trade, even a whole town. And kids like the 2nd New Quay and Llanarth Scouts in Aberaeron, Wales, can help. The kids surveyed forty shops and found that only nine were selling fair trade products. Ten others said they were interested in doing so. Aberaeron later became the one thousandth fair trade town in the United Kingdom.

FAIR TRADE FACT: In April 2000, Garstang in Lancashire, England, declared itself “the World’s first Fairtrade Town.”

Be Demanding

Telling people what you think is one of the most important ways to make trade fair. If you have a favorite store where your family buys clothes or groceries, ask your parents if you can find their Facebook page and write on it to tell the store that you’d like them to carry fair trade alternatives.

Many years ago Global Exchange started a campaign asking people to write a letter to Starbucks demanding it carry fair trade coffee. So many people wrote letters that Starbucks changed its practices. Now Starbucks is one of the biggest sellers of fair trade coffee in North America. All because people wrote to the company.

Soccer Mania

Rowan Nicholas playing soccer. KARI JONES

Rowan Nicholas started playing soccer when he was three. By the time he was thirteen, he was on a soccer field four times a week and playing in a competitive league. Soccer was important to him! In the space of a week his foot touched a soccer ball dozens of times. That’s why he was excited when he learned about fair trade soccer balls. First he asked his parents for a fair trade soccer ball for Christmas, and then he saved up his allowance and used it to help pay for a fair trade soccer ball for his best friend when his was bitten by a dog and ruined. They took their fair trade soccer balls to practice, and soon the other kids on the team were asking about them. “I love playing soccer, but I don’t want kids to make my soccer balls. They should be playing soccer too, not working,” Rowan says. When Rowan’s little cousin started playing soccer at school, guess what Rowan sent him? A mini fair trade soccer ball!

Buy Fair, Buy Less

Fair trade is about keeping families happy and healthy. LEVEL GROUND TRADING

Fair trade is not about spending more money or buying more stuff. It’s about bringing justice to people around the world. Fair trade projects are based on the idea that people need to protect their environments, their families and their homes. Parents want their kids to have the best life they can have. That means they go to school, have access to medicine and doctors, have clean water to drink and good food to eat, and have time to play.

You don’t have to spend money to support fair trade. Supporting fair trade is really about making wise choices. A kid who hands out a fair trade flyer or sings a fair trade carol is making as much of a difference as a kid who buys a fair trade T-shirt.

Fair trade is about remembering that we are all connected, and it’s about making the connections we have with people around the world as fair as possible.

If you have other ideas for how to get involved with a fair trade project, tell your friends and pass it on. The more people who think about making the supply chain fair, the better.

Fair trade dolls. JOANNE SPECHT