T.F.F
The Fruit Factory
~ Smoothie company
"Full of flavour;
full of fairness!"
Is it enough?
Just at first glance it is easy to see that this is an unfair trade! Yet we delve deeper and it gets even worse, the garmant on the previous page is fairly expensive right? Yet some companies are even worse. Primark sells jeans for £8! If the farmer gets 1/100 of the garment they get 8p for their work on those jeans. Yet how is this fair when cotton it traditionally sold in bales and it takes 500,000 plants to produce enough cotton for one bale. One bale makes 350 pairs of jeans. This is 17500000 plants! So for that pair of jeans you bought, the farmer who gave them to you had to farm 75000 plants! But you will only buy good quality jeans right? Well in that case the farmer has to care for his cotton well. The soil for strong healthy cotton plants must be high in posstassium and nitrogen and for one pair of regular jeans that cotton plants will require 1800 gallons of water! We don't think 8p is enough to support their crops to keep bringing in money, let alone their families. Do you?
 Primark Jeans - £8 |
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 Cotton plants |
 Cotton Farmers |
 Cotton Bales |
Poverty
Without fairtrade farmers do not have enough money to support both their farms and their homes so are inevitably destined for a life in poverty:
The fruit used to make your Fruit Factory smoothie has been brought over from sub saharan africa...
Education:
Fewer than 20% of women in sub saharan africa recieve an education that could allow them to take control of their futures. This is because the need for money is too great so they must settle for any job available. However it is shown that children of women with an education of at least 5 years are 40% more likely to survive.
Health:
Over 50% of Africas population was found to have a waterborn disease due to 37% of the worlds population lacking clean water living in Africa.
Every 30 seconds a child in Africa dies of Malaria. This diesease IS treatable and there IS a vaccine, but the community simply lacks the funds. Women in Sub saharan Africa are also 230 times more likely to die in childbirth than those in north america!
The factories:
Home
Life for the farmers in this region is tough with 1 in 3 undernourished, amounting to 239 million people who went hungry in 2010, yet they provide our food?!
On top of this 589 million live in the dark since they cannot afford electricity. This means they must cook using purely biomass; animal dung or wood. This also means they have no access to learning via the internet and it is hard for them to communicate their situation to the rest of the world. They can't. We can.
Rarely will large scale factories care for the health and safety for their workers. Often the machines will give off many toxic chemicals and the workspaces will be overcrowded. In some cases the spaces are poorly lit increasing the risk of accidents. Workers are not educated on how to use the machines properly and the machines themselves are not always well kept. The environment is unpleasant and dangerous, something our company trys to tackle thrugh our code of conduct.
Child labour is also very common in LEDCs since the family is so desperate for money. This deprives them of childhood and by working in low paid jobs from a young age whilst remaining uneducated takes the control away from their future. 1 According to statistics researched by UNICEF, one out of six children in the world today is involved in child labour, the highest concentration of this being in Asia and sub saharan Africa. Fairtrade ensures that the product has had nothing to do with child labour.
This fragile life means it is almost impossible to get back on track:
The farmers depend a lot on the natural elements for their crops to grow. This would include soil quality, altitude, natural disasters and weather which is very unpredictable.
If we go out of buisness we dont have too much to worry about, we have money in the bank to support us. Though with these farmers, being paid such a little amount if the weather suddenly changes everything they rely upon will be destroyed and they will have to start over with no excess money to fall back on.
Though, It isn't just their own crops they must rely on...
When world trade drops producers are the first to feel the implications. what they sell their goods for drops to a considerabley lower price, often too low to even cover production costs.