Make a difference by buying Fair Trade gifts

Looking for a way to make a difference with your Christmas shopping?
Consider purchasing a Fair Trade item. A variety of home decor, kids toys, and jewelry are available at the City Center Market in Cambridge.
Choose a red leather purse shaped like a cat made in India. Or, how about a wooden jewelry box from Indonesia? Wooden nativity scenes were carefully carved on the West Bank, or opt for a stone scene from Peru. There are also silk scarves, handwoven baskets and colorful purses.
Shopping for kids? Pick a drum or a unique African instrument, or get a wobbly fish pen from Chili.
With the purchase of these items you are not only buying a gift the people on your Christmas list will love, but you’re supporting workers in Third World countries, noted Gayle Cupit.
As the City Center Market Board Chair, Cupit helped bring the Fair Trade gift items available through Ten Thousand Villages to the Cambridge store.
She’s passionate about the Fair Trade concept. Ten Thousand Villages is a nonprofit fair trade organization that markets handcrafted products made by artisans from more than 130 artisan groups in 36 countries. Each artisan is ensured a fair wage, which helps bring their own family out of poverty. Additionally, a portion of the proceeds goes back into the community as a whole, sometimes to construct a well and other times a school.
“When people are paid a fair wage for their products, they’re able to support their own families and the community as a whole,” noted Cupit.
The Cambridge co-op has always supported the Fair Trade concept, and has sought to stock their shelves year-round with items such as bananas, mangos, pineapples, coffee, rice, sugar, tea and spices through the Fair Trade market.
It’s a niche that keeps growing as does public awareness of where food comes from. Cupit also attributes the popularity of Fair Trade items to a growing awareness of poverty levels around the world and a realization that people can make a difference elsewhere by what they purchase at their local stores.
“We may be paying a little more for an item, but that little bit of extra cost can make a big difference in peoples’ lives,” Cupit noted.
And that ties in perfectly with the goals of the co-op, which seeks to support the immediate community, as well as the global community, Cupit observed.
She added that Fair Trade items are grown to greener standards and are often organic. “We need to take care of the earth. It’s the only thing we have,” she believes. “People who are closer tot he earth in Third World countries are able to appreciate that more. We’re not as close to the origins of our food.”
She urges folks searching for that last-minute gift to check out the Fair Trade items available at the City Center Market.
Gifts range from $2 to $50.
“A lot are inexpensive enough to make beautiful hostess gifts,” she pointed out.
“Live the co-op values. Support your local community by making purchases here while at the same time support our global community by sending money to areas of the world where kids don’t have enough to eat.”

Making kaisa grass baskets brings joy to Kalpana Rani in Hazigonj, Bangladesh.

Hazigonj is a small village in a very rural, chronically poor part of northwestern Bangladesh. Most people like Kalpana can only find poorly paid seasonal work during rice planting and harvesting times. They can sometimes earn a little more money by collecting firewood and carrying it for many kilometers in the hope of selling it for a few pennies.

In 1999 Mennonite Central Committee encouraged a group of women including Kalpana Rani to organize into a basket-making artisan group using local wild kaisa grass and their traditional basket-making skills. These baskets are now sold locally and exported to Ten Thousand Villages in Canada and the USA. The income from basket making is greater than rice paddy work, and it is steadier and more consistent throughout the year.

Kalpana says that she can now afford basic healthcare for her family, a good steady diet of nutritious food, and decent clothing. She smiles broadly when she says she can now afford to send her children to school since she can afford to pay for school fees, books and supplies.

* From tenthousandvillages.com