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Our Advent fair trade in-person gift buying is back! This fall, get ahead of the holiday shopping by buying fair trade products from Equal Exchange (a cooperative partnering with interfaith groups such as the United Methodist Committee on Relief) during the coffee hour. You can pick up chocolate, coffee, Palestinian dates, and olive oil November 20 - December 11. You can also make a special order on November 20 and 27.
Fair Trade is a way of doing business that ultimately aims to do justice — to advance economic, social, and environmental goals such as raising/stabilizing the incomes of small-scale farmers, farm workers, and artisans, and promoting safe and sustainable farming methods and working conditions. Such goals may be even more important now as climate change is forcing some people to migrate and the COVID pandemic has both disrupted trade, increasing hardship for small farmers, and demonstrated how inter-connected we all are. A particular concern is the exploitation of child labor in producing cocoa for chocolate. According to the US Department of Labor, more than 2 million children in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire work in hazardous conditions growing cocoa. While some companies have begun tracing their supply chains to prevent child labor, the vast majority of the 3 million tons of cocoa produced each year come from small farms in West Africa, where farmers and their children live on less than $1 per day and child labor is common.
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