Find Fair Trade Products with a Couple of Clicks
Are you concerned with the hidden social costs of the products you buy? Want to support fair wages and social justice while you do your shopping?
Then you might want to consider choosing Fair Trade products over your other options, and now you can find them with just a couple of clicks.
October is Fair Trade Month in the U.S., and in support of that, Fair Trade USA has released an app to make it easy to find products which are fair trade certified: The Fair Trade Finder.
This app could really empower us to take our buying power and put it to work to make positive changes in our world, because many people claim that finding fair trade products is a barrier to purchasing them. A recent survey revealed that 62% of participants said they would purchase Fair Trade products more often if they knew where to find them, and 53% said they would use new media (such as mobile and smartphone apps and social networks) to locate those products.
“In the U.S. alone, consumers can choose from more than 10,000 Fair Trade Certified™ products sourced from 58 countries – everything from coffee, chocolate and tea to bananas, clothing, and sports balls. Our new Fair Trade Finder will be a game-changer in helping people discover these products in their own backyards during, and long past, Fair Trade Month.” – Paul Rice, president and CEO of Fair Trade USA
If you’ve got the lowdown on fair trade goods near you, you can help to build the listings on the app, as the Fair Trade Finder is also a crowd-sourced directory which lets you add products and the retailers who carry them, along with uploading pictures and adding tags and comments.
For more information, see Fair Trade USA’s Facebook page, or get the Fair Trade Finder app for Android or iPhone.
Readers may also be interested that BBC radio interviewed me last week about our campaign back in 1976 to import instant coffee from Tanzania to the United Kingdom. It started the idea of ethically sourced coffee in the UK. The broadcast is now available on YouTube (4 minutes):
http://youtu.be/4qiHw40CubY