Worldwide fair, local trade

from The Lake Elmo Leader

by Andy Blenkush

A woman named Sonny grows basil in the St. Croix River Valley. Miguel farms coffee in Peru. At Freeset Bags in India, women seeking freedom from the streets of Calcutta’s red light district can find work at Freeset to earn wages in a safe environment.

These people share a common denominator – they seek a fair price for their work.

Fair Trade is not a buzzword. It is an international movement gaining momentum across the globe, nation, state and St. Croix River Valley. Fair Trade networks strive for equality within international trading. It seeks to give farmers and artisans who struggle in today’s economics humane working conditions, educational resources and livable wages that allow them to compete in various markets worldwide.

River Market Community Co-op and Trade Expressions are two Valley-based businesses that recently delved into Fair Trade. The businesses look to expand the Fair Trade products they sell while educating people on a topic that is often under-publicized and difficult to understand.

“I hadn’t even heard, honestly, of fair trade a couple years ago,” Steve Ackerson said, who starting Trade Expressions, an on-line store that sells Fair Trade merchandise within school and church fundraisers.

During a trip to Costa Rica two years ago, Ackerson noticed the high literacy, resources and abundance of talent in the people living there. He also took note of the living conditions.

“I was appalled by the poverty level and shocked that people with so much talent aren’t able to bring their stuff into a larger market,” he said. “I just thought, ‘How can we help these very talented people bring their products to a broader market, a market that actually has dollars?’ I started looking around and found out about Fair Trade.”

Jenn Posterick, marketing and membership manager at River Market Community Co-op in downtown Stillwater, recently traveled to Peru on an educational trip revolving around Fair Trade and co-ops. Posterick was educated in Fair Trade, but the trip was every bit as eye-opening as she toured Peruvian coffee and produce co-ops to learn about Fair Trade and co-op education.

“We spent a lot of time [on the trip] saying ‘who the heck am I?’” Posterick said.

Many of the farmsteads visited are multi-generational. Witness to poverty and harsh working conditions, Posterick returned from Peru more determined to implement Fair Trade products into the inventory at River Market.

“We are working toward importing economically responsible products,” Posterick said. We buy fair trade whenever possible. We have a lot of fair trade nuts and chocolate. Coffee is the biggest one. It’s really their labor of love that put these items on our sales floor.”

A set of criteria established by the International Fair Trade Association, a governing body in the movement, must be met before gaining the Fair Trade Organization stamp of approval.

Those standards include creating opportunity for economically disadvantaged producers, transparency in book-keeping, helping producers gain marketing skills, giving a fair price for merchandise, demonstrating gender equality, promoting humane working conditions and promoting Fair Trade.

The criteria are set too loose for Ackerson’s liking.

“I would like to see international standards,” he said. “I would like to see that the Fair Trade label has a consistent meaning for everyone in the world, that people know exactly what it means.

“Right now, I think there is a real lack of clarity over what it means,” continued Ackerson. “Because of that there are a lot of opportunities for people to kind of capitalize on it, on its growing popularity.”

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