Forum topic: Playing (and paying) fair at the shops

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.