Fair Trade

Fair Trade. Local or further from home?

  • Local suppliers are considered

  • Only those involved in the Fair Trade scheme

  • Both considered, with more emphasis on those involved in the Fair Trade scheme.

  • Something else. Say what.


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classic33

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When you see the words Fair Trade on food. Do you think only of those that you may see in a Fair Trade advert, or do you think about those, closer to home, that also provide some of what you eat.

With farming relatives, in various countries, I'll have to say I've a slight bias. The same issues arise for many of them.
 
I would rather buy food that is grown/raised closer to home, but that isn't always possible especially with meat products. I usually associate fair trade with stuff from the co-op IE coffee and chocolate and to be honest it tastes bloody awful.

the problem with buying local is that normally I can only get things like vegetables once a week in the market. And as I said locally produced meat is horrendous in price and I just won't buy it.
 
I'm not sure what you are asking here.

I would rather purchase close to home, food grown locally etc (Cheshire potato season is due to start very soon...), but if you are asking what I understand "Fair Trade" to mean, I don't believe it includes close to home and generally believe it to be related to things like sugar and coffee which typically has had and still does on some plantation and farms, people working for very little money whilst the owners get rich. I believe the Fair Trade sticker to mean the other side of the world, not locally.
 
It's not always the owners getting rich, either. I spent some time in Ghana, working with fruit growers. Some of the things they told me were appalling. For example, they would often be told that fruit arriving in Europe had gone rotten and even when their consignments were accepted, they had to wait months and even years for payment. Obviously, the lower down the scale you are, the worse the deal, but the level of exploitation is shocking.
 
Well, I've voted on the understanding that you are asking what I think the term 'Fair Trade' means when I see it on food packaging.
 
I used to be a big fan of Fair Trade until I found out that it actually caused a shift in prices that put many American small farmers out of business because they could not compete. I don't like this at all. I do want people to be treated fairly, but that includes Americans as well. I always prefer to by local over foreign unless I am buying something specifically to assist a particular people group who would otherwise lack jobs entirely.
 
I prefer to purchase food grown closer to home, to me that means less chemicals in the food as it is fresher and less travel time to get to me. Some of the large food stores in the area will display locally grown items stating that they are local.
 
One or two have raised similar points as raised elsewhere with regards Fair Trade. Including the pay, or lack of.
When you consider the prices paid to producers closer to home(milk being an easy example, as much as 9p per gallon), do they not deserve fair trade as well?
 
Fair trade
Fair price to take into consideration all costs involved by all concerned , easy!
I prefer local produce direct from the farmer all the money goes to the producer, so that's fair trade
 
I actually did some research last week on fair trade for an article on coffee I was writing. Fair Trade can mean trade going on globally and does not just have to be local. Basically (we will use coffee roasters as the example here) roasters who want to be involved in fair trade scour the globe looking for coffee beans that are raised on ethically managed farms. This means that the roasters are looking to see if the farm workers are getting the essentials like clean drinking water, proper treatment, and fair wages for the work being done. It is about the roasters being responsible and making sure there are ethics involved before they agree to purchase the beans. This applies to many different food products, I am just using coffee as the example.
 
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