Merchants find fair trade marketing a win-win situation
Products include coffee, wine, clothing

By Amy Guckeen
Catholic Herald Staff
12/14/07

MILWAUKEE - For every $3 latte, a farmer receives a meager two cents.

Milwaukee area residents looking to change that have plenty of opportunities to do so through fair trade gift giving in the city.

Approximately 2.7 billion people in the world exist on less than $2 a day, according to the World Bank. Fifteen thousand children between the ages of 9 and 12 have been sold into forced labor on conventional cotton, coffee and cocoa plantations, according to a 2000 U.S. State Department report. Through the purchase of fair trade items, those statistics can change.

“People always ask, ‘Where can you buy something that’s not made in a sweatshop?’” said Mike Howden, with the Southeastern Wisconsin Initiative for Fair Trade and Four Corners of the World, which sells fair trade items. “We really have two missions, one to run the store, and to act as a marketplace for artisans and farmers and sowers from around the world who really need a marketplace so they can have a decent wage and raise their kids. The other is to educate people.”

Awareness of the opportunities to purchase fair trade items should be high in the city of Milwaukee, the first major designated fair trade city, as passed by the Milwaukee Common Council in a resolution this fall.

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