Taiwan Church News

3300 Edition

May 25 - 31, 2015

Editorial

Let Fairtrade Become An Evangelical Channel

Following the harvest season of peach, the staffs of Product DevelopmentDepartment of Tayal Presbytery will officially start their annual promotion of peach-sale among PCT hospitals. You can see them working hard in Mackay Memorial Hospital, Changhua Christian Hospital or even in Sinlau Christian Hospital in the near future. Instructed by the PCT Aboriginal Mission Committee, the Product Development Department was established seven years ago in Tayal Presbytery with the purpose to protect the farmers from exploitation through building a marketing channel inside of church community. Also, intending to protect the peach farmers from being exploited by the intermediary wholesalers, Taoyuan City Government especially promotes the peach product in a new brand name: "Ma Ma Peach"(ie Mother Peach) with measures to integrate sale and price, help find marketing channels to ensure farmers' benefits and help negotiate a good price for the farmers.

In fact, "Ma Ma Peach" is the tropical peach harvested abundantly in May, sothe farmers also call them "May Peach". As the timing of harvest is around the Mother Day, plus that many of the farmers are either single-mother or mothers aged over 60-year-old, these peach products are therefore specially named "Ma Ma Peach"(meaning mother peach). Such farmer-friendly policy, originating from church community and then influencing local governments to follow suit, is just the concept of "Fairtrade" materialized to give the due rewards to the hard-working farmers.

In his very beginning of his mission, Jesus proclaimed:"The Spirit of Lord isupon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor."(Luke 4:18-19). In contemporary age, dominated by the capitalism, the exploitation of the marginalized is not least held in common. The church has to start thinking again about "how to bring good news to the poor" in order to "let the oppressed go free!". Except the traditional social welfare and charity, maybe fairtrade a channel worthy to try and promote.

As a matter of fact, the first commercial trial of fairtrade products inEuropean and American countries, initiated by Christian religious institutes and non-governmental organizations(NGOs) in 1940s, was forging the fairtrade's supply chain of the products like artifacts, jute and cross-stitch in the developing countries. As the time passed by, the product range of the fairtrade concept enlarged to cover coffee and agricultural products.

In modern times, The Fairtrade Foundation of Great Britain even united withover 7,500 churches to form a "Fairtrade Church", incarnating the principles of trade justice of daily consumption into worship, assembly, scripture-reading and prayer. Such fairtrade actions in faith not only facilitated the public's understanding of the core values of fairtrade, but also alleviated the poverty problems brought by an imbalanced economic system.

Based on a mutually respected trading-partnership, fairtrade promotes adeveloping model with the vision of ever-lasting and morality in order to ensure: a fair reward to the manufacturers or growers; a deserved right to the labours; the protection of the environment; a channel to fight against poverty and exploit for the consumers. Taiwan, as a country famous for her energetic ideas and enthusiastic services, the Christian community here might consider promoting the idea of faitrade as the best ever channel to bring the good news to the poor.