A Note from the JUSTus Podcast Team, May 8, 2024

Edna Ruth Byler of the Mennonite Central Committee started working on Fair Trade in 1946 after visiting a women’s sewing circle in Puerto Rico. Although living in poverty, the women of the village created beautiful lace – which she brought back to the US to sell and return the money to the women of that village. Edna Ruth’s work grew into the Ten Thousand Villages retail store which opened their first fair trade shop in 1958 and is now the largest fair trade retailer in North America. 

The Catholic Church and the whole Christian community have been involved in Fair Trade for decades.  Pope Francis’s Evangelii Gaudium, The Joy of the Gospel, gave us the following. It encourages financial experts and political leaders to ponder the words of Saint John Chrysostom, one of the sages of antiquity: “Not to share one’s wealth with the poor is to steal from them and to take away their livelihood. It is not our own goods which we hold, but theirs.”  [p. 57]

This is a sobering thought for those of us living in a strong capitalist system.  Our morés have taught us that when we purchase something, it belongs to us. The connection between us, the purchaser, and the maker/artisan/designer, the producer) has become transparent and invisible.  Pope Francis reminds us to think differently and consider the originator of the product as always part of what we own.  This connection should make us more aware of both the product and the producer.    

John W. Miller wrote in America Magazine that “… trade is complicated.” As Archbishop Ivan Jurkovic, the Vatican’s envoy to the World Trade Organization, put it in a 2017 speech, “global trade has helped to lift a billion people out of poverty in developing countries and has improved the livelihood in many developed countries.” 

The Ignatian Solidarity Network says, “Fair Trade is an approach to business … based on dialogue, transparency, and respect that seeks to create greater equity in the international trading system. Fair Trade supports farmers and craftspeople in developing countries who are socially and economically marginalized.  At the core of the Fair Trade model is a direct, cooperative, and in-depth relationship between buyers and sellers that keeps the principles of fair trade at the forefront.”  The Fair Trade Principles are laid out on their website, along with a section on “Jesuit Communities and Fair Trade.”  

When talking with Sister Barbara Battista recently about Fair Trade, we laughed because my recent Google search for Fair Trade yielded 860,000,000 results! She responded, “Surely we can be clearer in our work than that.” Then she fired up her laptop, clicked over to the Sisters of Providence website, and found 11 Sisters of Providence fair trade stories on www.spsmw.org. If you are second-guessing your knowledge and acquaintance with Fair Trade, take a trip through the Sisters of Providence pages below. You might recognize the names of some of your friends as authors and contributors.

On the Sisters of Providence website, you will find:   

• How Fair Trade relates to climate change, 
• Fair Trade: products that improve the lives of people on the margins,
• Empowering Women, changing lives: Fair Trade meets Mother Theodore
• Chocolate for everyone!  A Fair Trade Event
• What does it mean to love my neighbor as myself?  A visit to the border
• World Day of Social Justice 
• Truth to the Calling:  Providence Associate Joan Frisz
• Eco-tips for living gently on Earth

Now go and find a fair trade shop close to you!