Ernie Atencio

Our local town council recently passed a resolution to make Taos the first officially-designated “Fair Trade Town” in the West. It’s also only the fifth in the nation, according to Fair Trade Towns U.S.A.

What does “fair trade” mean for a rural northern New Mexico town?

According to Wikipedia, fair trade is a “market-based approach to alleviating global poverty and promoting sustainability” that “advocates payment of a fair price as well as social and environmental standards . . . in particular on exports from developing countries to developed countries.” With some of the persistently highest rates of poverty and childhood hunger in the nation, New Mexico is right in there with many of those developing countries. And the northern counties are among the poorest.

The council’s resolution calls for public education and promotion of fair trade principles, encouraging local commerce in fair trade products and procuring and using “Fair Trade Certified products such as coffee and tea, which would normally be purchased for council meetings, office supplies, etc. when such products are available and competitively priced.”

It’s hard to imagine how buying fair trade coffee and tea and copy paper for town meetings (when competitively priced) will make much of a dent in global poverty. And what about buying local? Those third-world Taos-area farmers don’t grow coffee or tea, but they do grow organic wheat and wonderful produce and grassfed bison and beef.

Well, it’s a start in the right direction.