Why Buy Fair Trade Products and Gifts
There was a time, right up until recent years when most people generally felt that the way that they shopped and spent the money that their earned was completely disconnected with the things that effected their world that surrounded them. People gassed up their cars and tucks and prowled their local shopping malls with basically one thing on their mind. Finding the absolute lowest prices.
The Chickens Have Come Home To Roost
Then about a decade back the chickens came home to roost. It was revealed to the public that it was in fact their own money that by proxy financed the World Trade Center disaster. Also it was around the same time that people in the US Canad and Brittan began to realize that the cartels that were suppling the drugs that fueled the crime waves in these countries weren't going to be stopped by conventional means.
People Paying Other People To Take Their Jobs
The reason was that they operated with the full support and complicity of impoverished third world peoples. People who live on as little $2 per day, who view drug traffickers as modern day Robin Hoods. Lastly, people finally woke up to the fact that all along when they were buying dirt-cheap Chinese products, they were in fact financing the closure of manufacturing businesses in their own cities. Putting themselves and their neighbor out of work.
How You Shop Does Have An Effect On the World Around You
So it turns out that how you spend your money and what you buy as well as what you pay for it truly does have a profound effect, not only on your homeland but the lands and places where other people live in far flung regions of the globe. This is precisely why the Fair Trade organization was started and why it continues to grow in popularity at the exponential rate that it does.
Trying to Solve the Worlds Problems With Bombs and Bullets
People in the US Canada and Brittan are coming to realize that in spite of the farcical hype that their elected officials consistently send their direction at election time, the worlds problems can't be solved with bombs and bullets. That the only way that their countries are once again going to be safe and prosperous places to live, is by uplifting dis-empowered workers in far flung regions of the globe.
Doing Your Part By Buying Fairtrade Products and Gifts
When you buy Fair Trade products and gifts you can know for sure, without a doubt that the person or people that produced them were treated fairly both economically and socially. Secondly, by buying Fairtrade products and gifts you are letting those who still make it their business to capitalize on and take advantage of disadvantaged, vulnerable workers in third world countries that their way of doing this is outdated and coming to an end.
Fair Trade Is a Part Of the Total Solution
When you buy Fair Trade products and gifts, it isn't the solution to all the worlds problems, rather its just a part of the total solution. However; keeping in mind the level of complexity of the interconnected problems and issues that face all countries of the planet, there can be no 'one solution'. Rather it will take a compilation of many, including the one that is today held out by Fair Trade and all those who buy Fair Trade products and gifts when they shop.
About the Author:
Chris Tyrrell writes for Just Trade, an organisation that promotes and develops third world manufacturers. Visit the Just Trade fair trade products website.
