Pants to Poverty
Last updated 12/15/2008 1:44:27 PM
Pants to Poverty
Where do you buy your cotton underwear? Have you checked the label lately? A group of lads and lasses have got together to make sure that your boxers are not harming the planet, and that the farmers are getting paid a fair price for their cotton.
The Pants to Poverty gang held a bad pants amnesty in London to coincide with Fair Trade fortnight. Ben Ramsden, founder of Pants to Poverty, invited people to freeze their bad, pesticide-ridden pants and then smash them to bits, at the Fairtrade Foundation Fairground on the South Bank. All the while encouraging punters to invest in their Pants to Poverty branded underwear.
Established in 2005 by a youth group from Make Poverty History, Pants to Poverty is a campaigning social enterprise aiming to draw attention to the issues surrounding cotton farming: sweatshops, unfair prices and overuse of pesticides. All of the cotton used in Pants to Poverty is provided by Agrocel Pure and Fair Cotton Growers' Association, sourced from a group of cotton farmers in the Mandvi area of Kutch, Gujarat in Western India. Due to salinity of the soil, cotton is one of the only cash crops that farmers can grow here, yet for years they were unable to get a stable price for their crops.
Ben Ramsden says: "I didn't really understand the importance of Fairtrade until I was in Guyana in 2001 and saw the massive impact the movement can have on people's lives. My mission is to make the best underwear product available on the market and build a sustainable business model that can both support consumers and producers. To me, trade justice is the most important issue facing my generation today."
Check out the Pants to Poverty video on this site!
A call to action if ever there was one!
http://www.pantstopoverty.org