Fair Trade Rice

You can now add rice to the list of imported foods that you can buy in good conscience (assuming it has a Fair Trade label). From the Real Money article:

Most of the white and brown rice we eat in the US is grown on US farms. But most of the sweet smelling “aromatic” varieties of long grain rice—which are increasingly popular in the US—come to our tables from Asia: Jasmine and Coral from Thailand, and Basmati from India and Pakistan. If you’ve had a meal including aromatic rices recently, chances are that that rice was grown in rain-fed paddies and that small-scale farmers harvested it by hand. Unfortunately, what smelled so sweet on the stove may not have reflected a sweet deal for farmers. These producers are vulnerable to shifting prices and exploitative middle merchants, so they often earn far below a fair wage on which they could support their families.

Read the entire article here.