Organic vs Fair Trade

A report by the Food Standards Authority out today, 29th July, has stated that there are no health benefits to eating organic food

As a soft toy wholesaler we are not best placed to comment on the health benefits of organic food. However over the last 2 years we have been actively trying to move to ethical ranges. We have always been extremely careful with who we bought from but there was a natural progression and at first we investigated organic cloth

However the issue with organic is that although the cloth itself may be made with organic cotton its progress from there could be identical to any other mass produced toy. Being made with organic cloth was not a guarantee in itself that the toy was made ethically

The other issue was that to be certified organic takes time and money. The rag dolls we are buying are made from organic cloth but we cannot make this claim offical because the farmers are too poor to go through the certification process. Many of them are also too poor to afford the chemicals which is why their crops are organic!

All these issue lead us down the path towards Fair Trade toys rather than organic. Some of our more organised workers co-operatives also have organic cloth but others do not.

On balance we are happier to work with suppliers who are actively concerned with their communities and the impact of their manufacturing rather than just buying organic cloth. By their very nature they tend to be concerned with their environment and we have been humbled by what they have achieved.

As a matter of interest we now only source from one factory in China although we have a second factory we would be happy to work with.