Fair trade initiatives have been a major concern in recent years, with many consumers as well as food companies having increasing concern for the farmers and food workers that have been traditionally exploited for many years with low pay and long working hours.  Fair trade products are everywhere these days and after initially being more expensive than most people were prepared to pay a combination of increased awareness and better pricing has meant more and more products from our clothes to our food are fair trade sourced.

But what food that we get is fair trade?  After all, we quite often don't even know where our food comes from, let alone who brought it to our tables.  There are a surprising amount of foods that are now sourced from fair trade providers such as coffee, tea and chocolate.  These are crops that are picked in countries such as China, South America and India where many farm workers have had trouble in the past with poor working conditions and even poorer pay.

Once these items had become fair trade a whole host of other foods have now been sold as fair trade products such as fruit like bananas, a lot of fruit is grown en masse and so workers will need to work long hours in order to gather required amounts to fill the demand back here in the UK.  Now they are given not only fairer treatment but their communities have received investment such as clean drinking water and schools as well as other vital buildings like medical centres have been built.

Even drinks like wine have now become fair trade since the gathering of the grapes that goes into making wine, by increasing the range of fair trade foods to cover all foods that have been unfair to workers in the past it can ensure that the workers who have worked hard to provide our food get the right pay and working conditions to thrive and enjoy their work.  As more and more fair trade products hit our shelves and the issue of fair pay for food workers is made more clear to western consumers then the more successful this scheme will be which will benefit everyone.

The fair trade logo can be found on most fair trade foods and where possible you should try and buy this kind of food as opposed to those that do not bear the mark.  This will encourage shops to stock more fair trade produce for the future too.

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There are many fair trade foods on sale at your local shops such as fair trade coffee and fair trade chocolate.

Author: Phil Adams-Wright