Ethical Gifts with Fair Trade Scarves

Ethical shopping is at the forefront of news and opinion these days. A lot of ethical gifts are in the market but when it comes to gift, those beautiful fair trade scarves can surely be a good pick. A fair trade scarf is beautiful, organically produced, provides valuable income to those who actually hand make it, and allows people to buy wonderful gifts without having to line the pockets of unscrupulous big companies. 

Fair trading isn’t actually a new thing, despite its recent popularity. The idea has been around for nearly 30 years. It’s basically a way of importing goods and products that have been made, grown, picked and so on by economically backward people in the hardest places on earth. Fair trade scarves are just the tip of the ice berg: you’ll find fair trade products on the shelves of most super markets these days, ranging from bags, to jewellery and home ware.

Mostly, fair trade gifts and products are things that we love to own because of their exotic nature: their tastes, their colours, and the fact that they remind us of places we’ve probably never even been to. These places are the repository of our dreams and the locations of our aspirations: we want to go there, to experience the colourful silks and cottons.

Since the Western world grew a conscience in the mid 80s, though, the goods we imported (and still import) from these far flung places started to come under the moral scrutiny of the consumer. After a few false starts (it is always and only the consumer who dictates economic policy and the ways in which things are imported), people started to reject unfairly traded goods, demanding that the people who made these fair trade scarves (or at least the scarves that are now fairly traded) and so on be paid in accordance with their worth. That’s meant that the big companies have had to settle for a much smaller profit margin– and that a lot of smaller companies have sprung up whose mission is to provide fairly traded clothes and goods at all times. Using the smaller companies is ethically far more satisfying – after all, what’s better? Using a big company that sulks and reluctantly delivers fair trade goods; or using a smaller company that does the same thing cheerfully and from the word go?

With Christmas now starting to poke its tinselly head over the horizon and people wondering how to spend their restricted present buying cash this year, here’s a suggestion: join hands with the Third World and buy some fair trade scarves. Your family will love them; your money will go to a good cause; and people on the other side of the earth will smile on your behalf.