This Year's Theme

Fair Trade aims to change the economic and social structure of our world, and empowers marginalized people to help them escape the poverty trap.  If adults are paid a fair price for their work, their children are able to go to school and live a healthy and full life, rather than having to work. Fair Trade not only benefits adults - it helps kids too!

In 2004, 246 million children aged between five and seventeen were child labourers, 73 million working children were less than 10 years old, 180 million worked in extremely dangerous conditions and 6.4 million children were trapped in slavery, trafficking, debt bondage, prostitution, pornography and other illicit activities*.

Governmental programmes all around the world that sound promising ("out of work into school" "stop child labour" "action plan to eliminate child labour" "school is the best workplace") are all ineffective if the root cause of child labour is not tackled: poverty.
The unfair terms of trade for raw materials, crippling import tariffs in industrial countries, heavily subsidised goods from industrial countries are all practices that exclude and marginalise millions of people in the rural South. Fair Trade makes a concrete contribution to the reduction of poverty and thus tackles one of the main causes of child labour.


*Calculated by NEWS!