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How To Buy a Fair Trade Football

My brother’s an ethical guy. For some time, he’s been searching for an ethically-manufactured or ‘fair trade’ soccer ball . He finally located a Canadian site that shipped him a soccer ball manufactured by Talon Sports (PDF), a fair trade-certified company in Pakistan:

Pakistan supplies around 70% of the world’s footballs, with an estimated 44,000 men and women stitchers in the Sialkot region of Pakistan involved in the production of 35 million footballs every year. The industry has been criticised for low pay, poor working conditions and the widespread illegal employment of children who are forced into work because adult wages are often too low to support a family.

International campaigns in the 1990s have succeeded in virtually eliminating child labour by gradually moving production away from homebased stitchers to independently monitored stitching centres and providing constructive alternatives for children such as basic education and skills training. However, low pay and a lack of social benefits remain issues for workers in the industry.

There you go–now my little nephews can play with their new ball safe in the knowledge that it was wasn’t manufactured in a sweat shop. If they knew what a sweat shop was. And, you know, if the younger one could form full sentences.

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Darren Barefoot is an author, speaker and digital strategist. He’s the co-founder of Capulet Communications, and co-author of “Friends With Benefits: A Social Media Marketing Handbook”.

8 comments

  3. My son’s preschool has asked that any donations in the form of sports equipment only come from Fair Trade Sports.

    yeah.
    um.

  4. Ada: That’s a good policy for new products, but I’m sure that lots of donations are used sports equipment. Better to extend the of use a soccer ball made in a sweat shop than to buy a new one, regardless of its source.

  5. Completely agree, Darren.

    Let us know once your existing sports balls wear out, but until then, extending the use of your existing equipment is the best bet for our environment.

    Speaking of environment, our interntaional team is working on the first eco-friendly ball now (e.g. an FSC-certified latex air bladder). Of course, our source for FSC latex will also be Fair Trade.

    David Hall at YFOCUS is a superb gentleman and Fair Trade pioneer in Canada. I’m thrilled to be his teammate as we educate North Americans about Fair Trade sports balls.

    -Scott James
    Fair Trade Sports

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