Bill Linton from Enfield Fairtrade tells us about this month's Fairtrade Fortnight.
If you have been following the ongoing debates on what to do about climate change (and if you haven't it's time you did) then you will know that one of the recurring themes is climate justice.
We in the affluent North have created the problem, we have the economies that can afford to make substantial efforts to solve it, but it is mostly the poor people of the world, living in countries with much smaller economies, who suffer the worst of the consequences.
Poor farmers barely scraping a living cannot afford to give any consideration to the environmental consequences of what they do. In many (most?) cases, they are poor because their countries are poor, and their countries are poor because of the rapacious exploitation of European empire-builders – with Britain leading the charge – followed up more recently by the 'structural adjustment' policies of the International Monetary Fund.
Time for some levelling up – and one of the easier and most effective ways of doing that is Fairtrade.
It's Fairtrade Fortnight soon (21st February to 6th March), and we want to encourage you to buy more Fairtrade products.
How does Fairtrade work?
Look out for the official Fairtrade logo - there are coloured and black-and-white versions
You can recognise Fairtrade products by the official logo that they bear.
That logo ensures that the farmer who produced the product got paid a fair amount for doing so – not just the least the supermarket buyer thought he could get away with.
It means the family will eat regularly, the children will get to go to school, there will probably be at least the rudiments of a healthcare system.
But they can only sell their produce on Fairtrade terms if someone this end is prepared to buy it, and that's where you come in. Please try to look out for those logos and prioritise the things you see them on. There's quite a good selection: tea. coffee, chocolate, bananas, sugar, wine, some spices and cotton clothes spring to mind, and there are others.
It's a small but effective way to help bring people out of poverty.
People from Enfield Fairtrade will be out on the street on Saturday 26th February in Enfield Town (the exact location isn't yet known) - do come along and ask us about how the scheme works.
