2023 Update:

St Mary’s parish statement on Fair Trade

“Recognising our role to give dignity to the poor and hope to them for a brighter future, we in St Mary’s reaffirm our commitment to ethical purchasing and Fair Trade products. Wherever possible we will seek to purchase fair trade products or ingredients when the choice is between fair trade and not fair trade from similar countries.”

Project Background

St Mary’s became a Fair Trade parish well over a decade ago and has been careful to choose Fair Trade products whenever they are available. The pandemic and the necessary improvements in hygene made it difficult to continue with the old packs of biscuits. The current range of small packs of biscuits are not fair trade and contain palm oil. We’ve been learning from the children that palm oil from the plantations in South East Asia is fuelling deforestation of pristine biodiverse rainforest on a massive scale and species like the Orangutan are being pushed to the brink.

So how do we as a parish support the fair trade movement and protect biodiversity whilst catering for tighter hygene expectations of parishioners?

In this project we are exploring ways of bringing our purchases back into the fair trade umbrella and starting the conversation about ethical purchasing within the parish.

We will keep you updated on the status of the project here.

If you have any questions or suggestions, you can leave a comment below or use the contact page on the website and quote “fair trade project” in the form. Many thanks.