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Fair Trade Films
These documentaries depict the lives of farmers and producers around the world and the impact of fair trade.
Explore these sites:
- The Fair Trade Federation. An overview of all the issues around fair trade.
- Chaga and the Chocolate Factory (PDF). A story about a boy who is kidnapped and made to work on a cocoa farm.
- Global Exchange. An organization that aims to transform the global economy from profit centered to people centered, from currency to community.
- International Labor Rights Fund. An advocacy group dedicated to achieving just and humane treatment for workers worldwide.
- Responsible Shopper. This website promotes corporate responsibility, and provides ideas to help green your life and world.
- Growing Inclusive Markets. This UNDP report focuses on the private sector as the greatest untapped resource toward achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015.
What Is Fair Trade?
March 2, 2009—The products we avail of on a regular basis, whether clothes or coffee, furniture or chocolate, all have stories behind them. Stories that would, perhaps, influence our choices as consumers if we made the effort to find them out. For example, producers of these items are often the poorest people in the world, and many are not being paid fairly for what they provide.
Fair trade is about making sure that farmers, artisans and other producers in poor countries receive a fair price for their products, but it is not only that. It is also about ensuring decent working conditions, helping communities build capacity to create local sustainability, and maintaining social and environmental standards in the production process.
According the Fair Trade Federation, the 9 Principles of fair trade are:
- Creating opportunities for economically and socially marginalized producers
- Developing transparent and accountable relationships
- Building capacity
- Promoting fair trade
- Paying promptly and fairly
- Supporting safe and empowering working conditions
- Ensuring the rights of children
- Cultivating environmental stewardship
- Respecting cultural identity
Trading Ideas: Carmen Iezzi, Executive Director of the Fair Trade Federation,
opens up on
why consumers should be nosier, why chocolate is often more bitter than sweet, and how we all have more power than we realize. 
Traditionally, the lion's share of the profits from these goods goes to big companies, and the poorest are marginalized. The fair trade movement calls for companies to pay fair prices to those who make and grow the things we buy. This can make a huge difference toward better wealth distribution. Buying fair trade products is a very powerful way that we, as consumers, can help reduce poverty in the developing world.
The fair trade movement has gained a lot of momentum over the last decade. Even though fairly traded agricultural products still represent a very tiny percentage of world agricultural trade (around 0.1%), fair trade sales have been growing more than 20% every year since 2000. Fair trade is moving out of niche markets and into mainstream distribution channels, and is increasingly being recognized by consumers, public authorities and private companies as a tool for social sustainability.
Source: Growing Ethical Networks: The Fair Trade Market for Raw and Processed Agricultural Products (PDF)
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