After writ­ing the last post about my choco­late and cof­fee exper­i­ment, I checked my Green and Black choco­late, and to my dis­may it was not fair trade cer­ti­fied! Appar­ently, only their Maya Gold choco­late is both organic and fair trade cer­ti­fied. I went down to my local nat­ural foods store, and I found that there were actu­ally very few choco­lates that were both organic and fair trade. I may have to do a lit­tle online shop­ping for some chocolate

I also wanted to men­tion that even in the world of envi­ron­men­tal­ism, green liv­ing, and social jus­tice, the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of fair trade does have two schools of thought. One is that it is a good start in pay­ing peo­ple what their prod­ucts are worth and in ensur­ing that peo­ple work in a well main­tained envi­ron­ment with humane work­ing con­di­tions. On the other hand, some peo­ple feel that the fair trade cer­ti­fi­ca­tion leaves out a good num­ber of peo­ple who are fol­low­ing all the prin­ci­ples and pro­ce­dures of fair trade, but they sim­ply can­not afford the certification.

I under­stand both ways of think­ing. I know that there are prob­a­bly farms and pro­duc­ers who are fair trade in all prac­tices and prin­ci­ples and every­thing but cer­ti­fi­ca­tion. I also know there are prob­a­bly peo­ple who are fair trade in name only, that is they are doing the min­i­mal amount nec­es­sary to main­tain the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion and not doing any­thing above and beyond them. So, I’m not say­ing that fair trade ensures that you are buy­ing from the best source or that your money is being used in the most wise way. I do think it’s a good begin­ning though. More impor­tantly than trust­ing a gov­ern­ment or an agency to cer­tify the ori­gins of your food is doing some research your­self and ask­ing questions.

Meant to pub­lish this last night but instead of pub­lish­ing I saved it in my drafts folder