Fair Trade is all about improving lives, but we don't do that through charity - there is no hand out in the Fair Trade movement. People are solving their own problems through Fair Trade.

I saw people rise out of poverty right in front of me. ... It made me believe that the market was the most powerful tool for change that we could hope to have.

Fair Trade is a market-based, entrepreneurial response to business as usual: it helps third-word farmers developing direct market access as well as the organizational and management capacity to add value to their products and take them directly to the global market. Direct trade, a fair price, access to capital and local capacity-building, which are the core strategies of this model, have been successfully building farmers' incomes and self-reliance for more than 50 years.

By all means, let us simplify the means of controlling time and the myriad details of our lives, but let us vigorously preserve our responsibility to direct our lives toward human accomplishment, rather than the pure accumulation of information.

Fair Trade is all about improving lives, but we don't do that through charity - there is no hand out in the Fair Trade movement. People are solving their own problems through Fair Trade.