Fair Trade: Sustaining Small Businesses in Poorest Nations
Walk through your nearby Tescos, and you’re looking at the benefits of global market forces. One can buy just about any product at a cheap price. Whether it’s from Thailand or cornflower oil from Peru – it’s acquirable all year round. There’s never been a better time in the history of humanity to be a consumer! This has happened by just in time stock control, economies of scale, powerful competitive forces, and possibly most importantly, the fact that most manufactured goods are sourced, and frequently made, in second and third world nations.
The last point is rather important, and contentious. While consumers are enjoying food, drink, clothing and other items located from second and third world countries at rock-bottom prices, workers and business organizations in these producing countries are often short-changed, and have no real sustainability as they’re the last stop of a very lengthy line of middle men who determine what they produce, how much, and how often. This long chain of middle men all require their pay too – in the end there’s not a great deal of money left for the end-of-line producer.
However, there is help for such impoverished individuals and companies. Fairtrade is a movement that looks to give some power to these end-manufacturing businesses in the poorer nations of the planet. It looks to cut out the middle-men, and pay the end-manufacturer a fair price for a product in a much more direct way. You may have seen Fairtrade items in your nearby supermarket. You’ll sometimes find they’re a tad more costly, but by buying such ethical products or even ethical gifts – for example fair trade products – you will be happy to realise the manufacturer is working in a sustainable business environment that not only pays them evenhandedly via a much more direct revenue flow, but it also grants them to reinvest in their business through higher profits, which genuinely makes a difference to these poorer areas of the world.
