Llanelli is a fairtrade zone but first and foremost, the Llanelli constituency is a fairtrade community.
For local people in Llanelli, Fairtrade can seem a distant organisation. After all, we have so many problems in this society, just living from day to day.
This is why Fairtrade Llanelli wants to stand up for mental health issues in our everyday life. This is why we now call ourselves a Fairtrade Community. We have already mentioned the Fairtrade benches. We are getting a great deal of support from local councils around the constituency and our MP who hopes to have a couple for her community garden.
These Fairtrade Friendship benches are not original. They are already all over the country. We want ours to be a talking point to encourage people to talk to each other. Isolation is terrible and causes so much suffering in mental health that people go through because of this isolation.
These benches hope to be a support to local people. We will have a kind message, a Fairtrade principle and an information row with a telephone number for the Samaritans, Links, a local mental Health group and MIND Llanelli. They will be painted in Fairtrade colours.
There will be a row with information about the donor working with Fairtrade Llanelli. It will all be bi-lingual and the organisation paying for the bench will decide where it should be placed. We are looking at local councils, local organisations to fund them.
The idea is that we, in Llanelli, can boast about how, throughout the community, we can show our actual support for people suffering with mental health issues.
The other side to Fairtrade is climate justice. Our farmers in Africa, India and South America are our activists, fighting against the climate crisis. To them, the impacts of climate change are a daily reality. They are dealing with higher temperatures, drought, floods, extreme weather, crop diseases, soil erosion and sea water contamination. We are also being affected by all of these, in a smaller way but they are still there.
Extreme weather and rising temperatures are already hitting the production of major Fairtrade commodities including coffee, tea and cocoa. We have to reduce our carbon footprint. Again, as you can see, Fairtrade is important to you as well as our farmers. To help our farmers, we have a Fairtrade Premium Payment. The farmers choose how they want to spend that money in the global fight against climate change.
We also have Fairtrade Carbon Credits to enable farming communities in developing countries to tackle the effects of climate change.
Our farmers are on the front line.
Fairtrade helps farmers adapt , mitigate and become more resilient, and supports businesses and consumers to be part of a more sustainable supply chain.
Fairtrade is the most recognised and trusted sustainability label in the world. We are a global organisation that is co-owned by more than 1.8 million farmers and workers who earn fairer prices, build stronger communities and have control over their futures.
We help safeguard the natural world by promoting sustainable food production through our standards- for example by prohibiting highly dangerous pesticides or cutting down trees in protected areas.
Climate change is one of the greatest challenges we face. We all have to follow Fairtrade and show our commitment to a future world and in Wales, in particular, as we have the Well-being of Future Generations Act .We are connected to a globally responsible Wales, a well-being goal for Wales.
We in Fairtrade are very proud of that.
