Fair Trade: News & Updates

Lupita López Dearcia Comitán is a farmworker in Sonora, Mexico. She’s forty-four years old, has five children, and just so happens to grow the cucumbers you put in your salad last night. It’s a job she has a lot of pride in. Most people don’t know that cucumbers grow on vines like tomatoes, requiring constant care to ensure that the plant grows in the proper direction. It’s a technique called “training”, and Lupita has the practice down to a science.

It's Valentine’s Day and thoughts of love, friendship and gratitude permeate the air. Despite persisting pandemic stress, we at Equal Exchange are feeling a depth of gratitude and affection for the myriad relationships that we have cultivated since our early beginnings in the 1980s. We simply can’t say it enough: creating, maintaining, and deepening relationships are the pillars that our organization and our business model are built upon. Weaving together interactions between small farmer cooperatives, trading partners, like-minded businesses, non-profits, religious organizations, and citizen-consumers is both the means and the ends of why we exist. On this chocolate-focused holiday, it seems fitting to ask Dary Goodrich, Chocolate Products Manager, and Laura Bechard, Chocolate Supply Chain Coordinator, for a recent example that highlights Equal Exchange’s unique model of alternative trade.   

A new study shows the impact the warmer climate will have on cultivating coffee, avocados and cashews, and on the farmers doing so. Of the three crops, coffee will be hit hardest by warming: The study model foresees an overall decline by 2050 in the number of regions where it could grow. For cashews and avocados, results were more complicated. Certain growing regions would experience declines in those crops while others, such as the southern United States, would likely find more land better suited to tropical food crops like cashews and avocados. By predicting decades in advance how agriculture will change, scientists can help farmers know what to expect, and can advise policy makers on how to encourage farmers to use more efficient growing methods like cover crops to prevent erosion or planting new crops when needed.

According to the International Labour Organization there are more than 40 million victims of human trafficking and forced labor around the world today, including children. This is a hard truth that the Fair Trade movement is fighting to change.