Tuesday, January 16, 2007

Fair Trade the programme that says it all



Back to the Fair Trade topic again. As I mentioned before, we succeeded in winning Fair Trade City status for Kilkenny over a year ago. Now we see more and more businesses adopting Fair Trade products. It's no longer confined to coffee and tea however, as many people think. In recent months, we've seen the yummy Ben and Jerry's ice-cream launch their Fair Trade Vanilla ice-cream which is widely available. Then in recent months, Superquinn (normally first into the breach to do the right thing) introduced Fair Trade wine onto their shelves. Like Fair Trade coffee, there's no back to the undrinkable days, however, and Los Robles red and white from Chile is decent stuff.

My reason for blogging tonight however is to bring you the news of the Worlds Apart programme from RTÉ Radio 1 over Christmas, which was a fair and hard-hitting analysis of Fair Trade, and its impact on third world producers. Anybody who has followed Rodney Rice as a presenter knows that he never accepts truisms, or popular causes without digging deep to find the truth. Have a listen to the programme here, and make up your own mind, and then hopefully get out and buy more Fair Trade products, or better again, come and join us in the Kilkenny campaign, or work to make your town or city a Fair Tade town.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Well done on the Fair Trade campaign Seán. It certainly seems to have captured the imagination of the people of the city. What about highlighting the new fashion labels which are Fair Trade?