Fair Trade & Social Justice

President Donald Trump’s executive order this week requiring American meatpacking plants to stay open during the coronavirus pandemic is raising new questions about massive U.S. meat exports, particularly the export of pork to China.

In the United States, the novel coronavirus appears to be infecting, hospitalizing and killing black people and Latinos at alarmingly high rates, with data from several states illustrating this pattern. There are many reasons for this. Structural inequalities across U.S. society contribute to this problem, including unequal access to fresh healthy foods, specific targeting of communities of color by manufacturers of junk food, unequal access to health care, more workers in essential jobs who cannot stay home and excess exposure to toxic chemicals and unhealthy

I have been working in the fair trade movement for over 20 years. In 2010, I co-founded the non-governmental organization, Fair World Project, to promote the fair trade movement and watchdog the fair trade industry. I have visited many fair trade projects, from India to Ghana to Guatemala, and have found that organized farmers in long-term commercial partnerships with committed buyers not only fare the best, but are more

Last weekend, Kristin Davey received an unexpected shock upon entering her local nursery in Sebastopol, California, north of San Francisco. “The shelves were picked over. The vegetable starts were almost gone. And the seed racks were completely bare,” she said, “I’ve been going to nurseries for 15 years and I have never seen them so empty."