Would you like sugar in your coffee? How about fairness?
Given the unethical practices some companies engage in, this is a question Fordham students need to ask themselves. What we buy as consumers — from coffee to T-shirts to chocolate — matters.
On Oct. 31, the organization Students for Fair Trade made a presentation to the United Student Government in preparation for an attempt to encourage Fordham’s Board of Trustees to certify Fordham Fair Trade. This could be a momentous step toward making Fordham a university at the forefront of the fair trade movement.
The United States spent the better part of the last century, and some of this one as well, encouraging rampant consumerism and engendering widespread waste as a byproduct of what it thought was economic stimulation. In a culture that has bred massive production with no thought to the cost, monetary or otherwise, the fair trade movement promotes sustainability as opposed to wasteful consumption. Fair Trade implies a desire to assist developing countries by creating better trade conditions and protection for workers and the environment, and Fordham’s Fair Trade initiative is attempting to bring that idea to our campus.
Fair Trade promotes the economic growth of impoverished artisans and skilled craftspeople, who have long suffered from unjust trade practices at the hands of unscrupulous corporations and worldly greed. Their working environments do not affect the quality of the work they produce, yet these people have, by and large, not received the recognition or compensation they deserve. Fair Trade is a way of changing these conditions for the better.
Fordham Fair Trade is the first step toward becoming a fully-certified Fair Trade University, in a network that includes institutions across the country from the University of San Diego to our Bronx neighbors at Manhattan College. The development of fair trade on our campus speaks to living in the Jesuit tradition, and we at The Fordham Ram believe that Fordham Fair Trade is an excellent step forward for our university. Becoming sustainable should be a major goal at the forefront of every entity in the 21st century, and Fordham is striving to be among the leaders of that push in this country.
Each semester, countless Fordham students live the Jesuit philosophy of homines proaliis, men and women for others, by volunteering at local soup kitchens, clothing the homeless, participating in Fordham’s Global Outreach Program, tutoring schoolchildren and more. By making Fordham a fully certified Fair Trade university, students can be men and women for others simply by buying a cup of coffee.
Using American made products is safe and the best policy. Avoiding goods and food from despotic countries like Cuba and China is safer, and more socially conscious.