Fair Trade Your October with Global Exchange

Global Exchange has 31 creative ideas to celebrate a Fair Trade October.

Here are a couple I like:

• Find out which stores in your neighborhood sell fair trade chocolate and buy your Halloween candy there.
• Host a screening of the Dark Side of Chocolate… they even include a tool kit with everything you need
• Check out the rest of the Fair Trade October ideas

Buying Fair Trade items helps prevent slavery by supporting sustainable markets for vulnerable people in developing economies.  It also helps fight slavery by sending a message to companies that don’t support Fair Trade, giving them a business incentive to support sustainable markets.

When I buy chocolate and other candy from Hershey, MARS, and Nestle today, those companies can’t assure me that my products weren’t grown, harvested, distributed, and even manufactured by slaves and child labor.  I used to love M&M’s, but they don’t taste as good to me when I picture a slave picking the cocoa for CEO Paul Michaels at Mars.

I’m glad to hear that Hershey has responded to pressure from the Raise the Bar Hershey campaign, and announced that they are committing to be 100% Fair Trade by 2020.  While that’s better than NOT committing to becoming Fair Trade at all, it’s still 7 years away.  I guess if Hershey is asking the farmers and laborers to wait 7 years for Fair Trade practices, then Hershey can wait 7 years for me to buy their products.  In the meantime, I’m keeping an eye on Nestle and Mars to follow suit, and I’ll keep buying chocolate and coffee that are Fair Trade now.

What is your reaction?  How do you decide which candy, costume, or products to buy for Halloween? Click here to leave a comment, or click on the bubble next to the title of the post.

Jewelry from Made By Survivors

Check out Made By Survivors and shop for beautiful jewelry that was handmade by survivors of poverty, abuse, and human trafficking.

http://www.madebysurvivors.com/handmade-jewelry

Supporting women who are working to rebuild their lives after oppression and hardship fits in the bigger strategy of how to turn the tide against slavery

1. Reduce Supply – Sustainable economic development to help prevent people in poverty from becoming victims of slavery (or become victims again)
2. Reduce Demand – Responsible, knowledgeable consumers who reduce demand for slave labor by insisting on transparent, verifiably free-labor supply chains (shop carefully, knowledgeably, and compassionately for things like gold, chocolate, fruit and vegetables, cotton, high tech minerals, low cost consumer goods, rugs, clothing, etc)
3. Reduce Demand – Men not buying women and children for sex (train young men not to treat women and children that way, and enforce laws against men who do)
4. Reduce Supply – investigate and prosecute people who exploit and enslave others
5. Reduce Supply – rescue and rehabilitate slaves in every country (child soldiers, slave brick makers, enslaved sex workers, debt bondage victims, tomato pickers, cotton farmers, children maimed for the purpose of begging, slave brides, and so on)
6. Reduce Supply & Demand – end regional conflicts in places like Congo and Mali which increase the demand for human trafficking because the armed forces enslave child soldiers and require criminal networks to traffic victims as a source of funds for weapons and supplies, but also increase supply because of displaced people and communities, destroyed natural resources and infrastructure which removes people’s source of income. And the conflicts themselves are a result of the forces that lead to human trafficking in many cases. For instance, in Congo, much of the struggle is for control of mineral resources that are used in our Western high tech consumer goods, such as smart phones and computers. When we buy electronics at the local warehouse store, we may be fueling a war on the other side of the world which is contributing to the supply and demand for slave labor. And that’s in addition to the fact that the electronics themselves may involve slave labor in their manufacture.

Not to mention governments passing and enforcing anti-slavery laws, people reading books and watching movies to educate themselve and others, researching human trafficking solutions, fighting international criminal networks that traffic people, and being alert to human trafficking in our own communities.

Slavery and human trafficking are not going away any time soon, but this generation can at least turn the tide, and attempt to hand the next generation a world that is more slavery free than today. Supporting groups like Made By Survivors is one good way to support the fight.