Fair Trade is a special label created in the Netherlands in the late 1980s. The first Fair Trade consumer label started in 1988 on coffee sourced from Mexico.
In the next years it developed to such a big label you can find almost everywhere in the world now.
The Fair Trade symbol was adopted by FLO International in 2002. You can interpret it in many different ways and it's just your own feeling how you interpret this symbol.
You can see the green part as a leaf and the black as a road leading into a better, a brighter future.
But the most popular interpretation is to imagine the green as grass, the blue as sky, and the black as a person - a person as a farmer or worker working in the fields and holding one arm with his products aloft or a person as a part of the Fair Trade system connecting the idea and helping the people. Most of the products which are sold with Fair Trade prices come from poor countries in Africa or South America.
In shops which sell Fair Trade products, which include also popular discounters like Aldi or Lidl, you can for example buy things like tea, coffee, chocolate, cocoa, bananas, cotton products, rice, sugar etc. We can buy them in our supermarkets because they are imported products. So if we think about this big affair, of the way and time it takes to bring these goods to Germany, we should notice that these things should cost a lot more money. But the truth is they don’t! They actually cost just a wee bit.
Because of this problem, there are some shops and companies which sell products more expensive, so that the workers in the countries where the products originally come from, earn as much money as the products are actually worth. Otherwise the things we buy are so cheap that the people, who work for them, like workers on plantations or in factories get wages which are so low that they don’t have enough money to buy food for their family, pay the school fees or things like that.
It’s a pity that no one takes the importance of Fair Trade really seriously. People just care about their own business and don’t want to pay more for those things.
