Trade Justice in Texas

"Fair trade touches people because it makes so much sense," says Bread for the World and ONE Campaign campus activist Kate Dillon. "People get it if you just say, 'The farmers who grew your coffee got paid fairly. They earned enough from their work to feed their children and send them to school.'"

A student at the University of St. Thomas, a Catholic university in Houston, TX, Dillon is dedicated to winning support for fair trade. She said that overall, the issue is rather new in the United States. There are a few pockets where people are very much aware, but fair trade is not yet a mainstream cause as it is in the United Kingdom, for example.

But when Dillon organized a Trade Justice Day on her campus in November, she was surprised at the level of interest. "We brought in local vendors who supply fair trade coffee and sugar. We had about 1,000 little packets of fair trade sugar, plus five of us used the sugar to make fair trade baked goods. We also offered chocolate. And people weren't really responsive to the free food samples as much as to the issue itself. I really found that they were intellectually engaged."

In addition to signing the ONE Campaign Declaration, students persuaded the campus library to order a large supply of fair trade coffee for finals week. Plus, there is growing support for switching to fair trade vendors university-wide.

Dillon traveled to the G-8 summit in Scotland last July as a member of Bread for the World's delegation. In December, she volunteered at a fair trade event at the high-level Hong Kong meeting of the World Trade Organization.

"It was a wonderful experience to meet some of the vendors – from Bangladesh, Indonesia, all over. They really are committed to using fair trade to provide development opportunities for their people."

Dillon said that these opportunities to see things firsthand have strengthened her activism at home. Fair trade can unite people across religious and political lines.

"I know people who are really dedicated to fair trade from a free market point of view as well as from faith and social justice perspectives," Dillon says. "I think trade has great potential to really make a difference for hungry and poor people – which, of course, is what we're all working for at Bread for the World."

For more on making trade fair, read the Background Paper from the February-March 2006 issue of Bread newsletter.