If you’ve been following along with Fair Trade 101, you’ll know that for the most part our focus has been on individuals and their contributions to the Fair Trade movement.  I want to zoom out a bit today to get a better idea of the big picture.  There are a lot of themes that run through the history that might be obscured when we focus on individuals.  It’s my hope that these themes become a little clearer today when we take a broader view.

Edna Ruth Byler:

In 1946 Edna traveled to Puerto Rico with her husband.  While there, she found elaborately designed hand stitched goods. She was impressed with the quality of the pieces but was shocked to see the living conditions of many of the artisans.  She realized that the craftspeople did not have access to a big enough market for supply and demand forces to work properly. Edna decided to take back some of the pieces to sell in America.

Notes:

We’ve covered a lot so far in the first three weeks, and I wanted to take some time to review what we’ve covered and then look at where we’ll be going.  If you’ve been keeping up with everything this might seem redundant, but I think it’s worth taking a big picture look at everything before we move on.

Moral Economy:

Look up the history of fair trade online and you’re likely to come across the topic of Moral Economy.  Moral Economy is defined (at least in relation to Free/Fair Trade) as a shared system of beliefs within a specific population about what is fair and equal.  The idea itself isn’t too controversial.  Most people would likely accept that there are shared beliefs about fairness and equality within individual societies.