How to Improve Fair Trade: #2

2. Forced labor and exploitative child labor are not allowed

Neither are they respectable on a worldwide scale.  No country’s people or system of trade advocates for these conditions.  Unfortunately, these conditions exist and we can’t just wave a magic wand and make them go away.

Simply not allowing something is a very poor way to go about dealing with a problem.  It immediately rejects any small steps that may improve the situation from where it currently is but not solve it completely.  It is also unreasonable to assume that these conditions can be reached without passing through many of these small steps.

For example, let’s take a family in poverty that has barely enough resources to evade starvation and no access to daycare or clean water.  What is more exploitative, the situation where the children in the family work and help the family continue to survive or the regulation that says that they are not allowed to do this?  Of course, the current ‘fair trade’ movement does not advocate blocking these families’ only means to survival, but it doesn’t take a very close look at the feasible available alternatives.

Some people say high-income countries should send money to the low-income countries, though the problem doesn’t end there.  Money isn’t everything.  These people also have to learn how to sustain a lifestyle outside of poverty.  Many of the countries where this is a problem don’t even have institutions or governments that can offer a sustainable environment, free from special interests and war.  A discussion about the best way to solve these problems has been tied up in bureaucracy for years and no agreements have been reached.  While this debate continues, we need to ask again, what is more exploitative, the situation where the children in the family work and help the family continue to survive or the regulation that says that they are not allowed to do this?

I do not wish for unnecessary child labor, nor do I think a mother who is living in poverty would put their child to work if it were not necessary, but by denying poor families from opportunities they have we are not trying to solve problems that exist, but problems that we would like to exist.  Denying opportunities to families in poverty and their children, even if they are marginal and not up to our own society’s standards, is not fair.