Fair Trade Certification offers us a critically important set of clues as we go about selecting purchases in a crowded marketplace. When we see the Fair Trade mark, we see a product that comes to us through safe working conditions, that provide a good price, and whose manufacture reflects community development and environmental sustainability. It’s an integrated approach that ties together economics, social justice and ecology. It gives us buyers assurances that we apply our purchasing power to the support of values that resonate with an interest in seeing good being done worldwide.
The Fair Trade movement is about 20 years old and is global in reach, aiding farmers and craftspeople around the world with guidance for sustainable production and with stewarding the entry of their goods into the global marketplace. Each year, the second Saturday in May is designated as World Fair Trade Day. On May 8, at least 350 fair trade organizations from more than 70 nations rally around the cause of economic and environmental justice, educating their local communities and highlighting success stories taken from the ever-growing and thriving community of Fair Trade participants. Visit the World Fair Trade Day website to learn more about the event’s history, about where Fair Trade issues stand today and to learn about events taking place near you.
In the US, Oakland, Calif. based TransFair USA is the sole American provider of Fair Trade Certification services that involve a top-to-bottom audit of how goods are produced and delivered to the market. The TransFair team has been hard at work for more than a decade, beginning in 1998 with services to certify coffee production. Since then, their scope of service has evolved as compassionate and informed shoppers responded favorably to the availability of indicators pointing to fairness and environmental sustainability. Today, TransFair has put its certification seal on fruits and vegetables, spices and herbs, cut flowers and nuts, among other products.
And now, as the TransFair team was kind enough to inform us, vodka joins the roster of Fair Trade Certified items, making it the 106th such product bearing the certification by TransFair USA.
FAIR. Vodka is not only the first vodka produced from quinoa, but it is additionally the first made from previously Fair Trade certified ingredients, with quinoa grown by a 1,200 member cooperative in Bolivia. The vodka along with Fair Trade Spirit Company‘s goji berry liqueur are gathering the attention and enthusiastic support of buyers and barkeeps worldwide in providing tasty choices that represent doing good in the world.
A toast, then, seems in order, as World Fair Trade day arrives: here’s to the individual, hardworking farmer who takes no shortcut in producing their items, and to those who let us know that our purchasing power is directly supporting integrated economic, social and environmental justice.
Cheers!
Photo via TransFair USA.