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| Tanya Macias and Brother Barnabas Simatende, OMI, view Fair Trade offerings at an Oblate School of Theology sale.
Photo provided |
By Carol Baass Sowa
Today's Catholi
SAN ANTONIO • “The Fair Trade Movement,” says Father Juan Molina, OSsT, Advocacy Program Coordinator for Catholic Relief Services (CRS) Southwest, “is a consumer driven movement that simply pays a little bit extra for the goods that people buy.” They do so, he explains, because that extra money goes directly to the producers of the goods in developing countries around the world.
The movement began in the ’40s with the Mennonites and was eventually taken up by Catholic Relief Services and the Episcopal Conference. Individual Catholic parishes were involved even earlier.
The Fair Trade Movement is a global one in which consumers in countries where many have disposable income purchase goods from Fair Trade producers in developing countries, primarily in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The movement embodies a commitment to building respectful, enduring relationships in which those producing the goods are paid a fair wage and have opportunities for advancement in a safe, healthy working environment, with equal employment opportunities and public accountability.
People in developed countries do this, Father Molina, explains, “because we care about our brothers and sisters overseas, who many times make subsistence level salaries and live in substandard conditions.” Financial and technical assistance are offered to Fair Trade producers whenever possible and environmentally sustainable practices are encouraged.
Father Molina points out Fair Trade coffee (the most popular Fair Trade product) is organically grown in a shady environment, rather than cutting down forests. Tastier because of this, it brings a higher price. “So besides being good for the environment,” he notes, “it is also good for the people who produce it.”
Coffee, chocolate and a variety of arts and crafts comprise the bulk of Fair Trade goods. Arts and crafts are typically made from whatever resources are locally available — olive wood, alabaster, recycled metal, gourds, seeds and even the spines of palm leaves. Offerings include hand-woven baskets, clothing, jewelry, pottery, carvings and a variety of decorative and useful items — everything from colorful Christmas tree garlands created from folded palm leaves in Bangladesh to a cotton patchwork “Cozy Cat Draft Stopper” from Nepal, stuffed with flax seeds, Peruvian bamboo panpipes and jacaranda wood salad servers, hand-carved by master carvers in Kenya.
Products can be ordered through the CRS “Work of Human Hands” Fair Trade catalogues, either for individual purchases or to be sold on consignment by your parish, school or organization. Just contact Father Molina at jmolina@crs.org or (210) 366-3884. (To learn more about CRS, visit www.crs.org.)
One of the early promoters of Fair Trade products in San Antonio was San Fernando Cathedral under the leadership of then-rector, Father David Garcia. While on a sabbatical in Europe several years before, he became aware how much more attuned European Catholics were to the developing world than Americans, and the very real sense of connectedness and advocacy taking place there.
When he returned to the cathedral, he implemented selling Fair Trade tea, coffee, chocolate candy and olive oil year-round in the cathedral gift shop, plus parish sales of other items twice a year, on Christmas and Mother’s Day. “People really responded positively,” he noted.
At Christmas-time, Father Garcia would tell parishioners, “Look, if you buy one of these items, you have now given two gifts — one is the gift of a fair salary to somebody who made the item, and the second is the gift that you give to somebody else.” Purchasing Fair Trade products, he pointed out, gives their producers “dignity, gives them a chance to have a decent home, educate their children, work under fair conditions and preserve the environment,” rather than exploiting someone by buying a product that ultimately keeps them poor.
“We tend to forget how desperate the need is in so many parts of the world,” he adds, “where a billion people only have a dollar a day to live off of” and people sometimes go days without eating.
St. Dominic Parish locally, Father Molina notes, was an early proponent of Fair Trade sales, promoted by their youth and young adult groups. Rather than return any unsold consignment items, they keep them for later sales. He adds that profits made from sales can be retained by the sponsoring group or can be donated to the CRS Fair Trade Fund, which assists third world farmers and artisans in producing and selling their products.
The latter is the practice of a middle-class parish in Arizona that Father Garcia visited as part of his current job as Senior Adviser for Clergy Outreach for CRS nationally. The parish holds a sale once a month in which 180 lbs. of Fair Trade coffee sells out after just two Masses.
“You don’t have to change everything at once,” notes Father Molina. “You can begin by buying one pound of Fair Trade coffee a month, but by that act of solidarity, you are basically putting your faith into action.”
He described a successful coffee cooperative that has aided poor coffee farmers in the southernmost Mexican state of Chiapas, where they had previously been forced to sell their individual crops to middlemen who took advantage of them. In the ’80s, when coffee prices dropped dramatically, many farmers were unable to make a living and attempted to cross the border into the United States in search of a way to support their families. Some made it; others did not.
In order to help those who remained behind make a decent living in their own homeland, a coffee roaster and packaging facility was set up in the Mexican town of Agua Prieta on the Arizona border. After the coffee is roasted and packaged in Mexico, it is then exported to the United States, allowing the profits to stay within the cooperative, as the real profit in coffee is in the roasting and packaging. Father Molina has taken persons training to be Fair Trade Ambassadors to see the coffee-roasting and packaging facility first-hand.
“I think we can never lose sight of the fact that to be Catholic is to be universal in our outlook,” said Father Garcia, noting that we may not be able to jump on a plane to a far off country to personally give donations to those in need, but we can remember them, learn more about them, pray for them and give whenever we have the opportunity to do so. “And when we have the opportunity,” he adds, “to buy Fair Trade items.”