A nice article about farmers who participate in the Fairtrade program and what it means to them. When it's possible I try to buy Fairtrade products. A few years back I visited some coffee plantations around the old US base at Khe Sanh and heard that coffee workers there made roughly $1/day, which at the time was the mandated minimum wage in Vietnam. Not long after I visited a coffee plantation along the Guatemala-Honduras border where workers received about $2/day but they were unable to compete so jobs were bleeding. The business was struggling to survive due to competition from Vietnam. The Honduran coffee workers had such a limited future and of course, other possible jobs such as garment factories were also disappearing due to overseas competition as well. Once the hotspot for US factories, that too had been abandoned for riches in China.
When local opportunity disappears in places like this, these workers head north to America or Europe, just as many of our forefathers did in the past. Many of these workers would not be leaving their home countries where they have friends and family if they had opportunities. Fairtrade is about helping build opportunity for people to live. If the people who complain the most about illegal workers did something to help people earn a decent wage (we are not talking about striking gold, but just a livable wage) we would have much less of a problem. Read on and hear from a few Fairtrade participants.
