Filipino fair trade advocates visit Toronto

Filipino fair trade advocates visit Toronto

TORONTO–They look like Toronto tourists from the Philippines, neatly groomed in casual wear, including Philippine-made beads for accessories.

However, these two visiting Filipino women are serious fair trade entrepreneurs, who came to Toronto to attend a fair trade conference and participate in the Canadian National Exhibition to promote Philippine fair trade products.

Geraldine M. Labradores, managing director of Southern Partners and Fair Trade Corp., and Ruth Fe S. Salditos, executive director of Fair Trade Foundation – Panay, are ardent advocates of fair trade in the Philippines, and internationally.

Fair trade, they explain, demonstrates that trade can be conducted in a manner that serves social justice, as well as genuine and sustainable development.

Most importantly, fair trade ensures “the fair, equitable, and democratic distribution of national wealth and mutually beneficial distribution and exchange of products and goods between people for the benefit of the toiling producers.”

Labradores and Salditos, when not tending to their booth at the CNE, are meeting with some of Toronto’s fair trade retailers, and other interested markets of their Philippine food products.

They are also arranging meetings with the City of Toronto’s food policy staff, non-government organizations, and fair trade associations.

Among the products they are promoting are dried mango slices, dried pineapple, dried mixed fruits, virgin coconut oil, organic brown sugar and ginger chews.

Other fair trade products produced by fair trade farmers and processed by trained youth and women are mango jam with kalamansi, pineapple jam, mango puree, and mango juice with kalamansi.
Both Saludares and Salditos believe that the principles of fair trade cannot be genuinely lived and practised in isolation with the broader efforts to deal with poverty and social equity issues. These issues brought about by the centuries-old land problem, and inequitable marketing practices that leave out the interest of the producers in favor of the landowners and marketing middlemen.

The Toronto trip of Saludares and Salditos were facilitated and supported by the Anglican Church and the solidarity groups in Toronto.