St. Thomas of Canterbury
Fair Trade

Femi: Hello/good morning. We are from St Thomas of Canterbury Primary School. My name is Femi.

Ruth: And my name is Ruth.
Our topic is food. We started by looking through our kitchens to find out where our food comes from. We discovered that most of our food comes from other countries.

Femi: Which ones?

Ruth: India, Italy, China and that’s just a few of them.

Femi: Well that shows how closely we are linked with the rest of the world.

Ruth: We focused on bananas and the process of how we get them.

Femi: First of all the grower and the picker grows and looks after the bananas. The packer collects the bananas before they are ripe and transports them to the shipper.

Ruth: The shipper sells to the importer and the wholesaler buys from the importer and keeps the bananas until they are ripe to sell to the retailer or shop.

Femi: Who makes the most money out of all this?
The people growing the bananas?

Ruth: No

Femi: The picker?

Ruth: No

Femi: The packer?

Ruth: No

Femi: The shipper?

Ruth: No

Femi: The importer?

Ruth: No

Femi: The wholesaler?

Ruth: No

Femi: The shop?

Ruth: Yes!

Femi: They get the biggest share of the money and the grower gets the least.

Ruth: And is that fair?

Femi: No!

Ruth: It was now that we started to learn about Fair Trade.

Femi: What is fair Trade?

Ruth: Fair trade is giving the different workers, who bring our food and drinks to us, a fair amount of money for their work.

How does it work?
Femi: There are different products that are fair traded, for example, coffee, tea, cocoa, honey, bananas, mangoes and orange juice.

Ruth: Fair trading looks after two groups of people; small farming businesses and workers from plantations and factories. Not only do they buy the products directly from the farmers at a guaranteed price, it insures workers are paid a decent wage, have a right to join a trade union and provides good housing.

Femi: We continued our research at the Urban Studies Centre by interviewing people involved in the food industry.
Alan Watts, Hammersmith Town Hall Centre Manager, told us all about Farmer’s Markets. The most important thing about Farmer’s Markets is the food is fresh and local. The person who grows the food brings it straight to the market to sell.

Ruth: Mary Corrall brought in a lot of fair traded products. The chocolate was yummy.

Femi: Chris Shipton from Bushwaker in King Street, told us which foods are fair traded in his shop. He thinks it’s unfair that the growers get the least money because they do most of the work.

Ruth: A groups of children carried out a survey to find out what the public know about fair trade. They interviewed 45 people and 23 people bought products that had the fair trade mark.

Femi: We are also e-mailing children in Colombia, where they grow coffee, about our project.
Lastly, we want to tell you all here today that we think we need fair trade in our world.

Ruth: You can help by buying more fair trade products and you will know this by looking for the fair trade mark on the packet.