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Dorothee

Dorothee

Germany

March 6, 2011

                                                                                                     3/6, 2010

Dear Sir or Madam,
I write this letter, because I have a proposal to make, since I realized that none of the products offered in your supermarket is marked as a product being produced in fair trade. If you ask me, it would be only profitable if you sold fair trade products aswell.

It goes without saying that I understand potential worries concerning the fact that these products are more expensive than most other ones, but please let me explain why according to me the advantages of these products outweigh the disadvantages.

Actually I had the idea of writing this letter after going to church today. For a few weeks now they have been offering all kinds of food produced in fair trade there. It was remarkable to see how many people-including me-bought those products. I even took the chance to buy things as presents for my relatives, since I wanted to take advantage of the chance of doing a good deed-namely to support peasants living in developing countries-while at the same time just caring for the physical well-being of my family and me.

Today for example our church really benefitted from those products, since-as I indicated before-there were a lot of people willing to spend their money this way. I presume this is not only a matter of religion teaching them to live the principle of charity, but also a psychological matter. People feel the need to be useful and of course they are glad to get offered a chance like that to do something that may help others.

Another example that proves how necessary it is to change your supplier is an educational. As far as I am informed things like fair trade and the poverty of developing countries were not thought at German high schools some decades ago. However our educational system has changed as you may know and so has our attitude towards this subject. To give you a personal example I can tell you that this very semester we have talked about it in social classes, geography and in religious education; let alone all the other semesters when we also had discussions about it in English. We students were told how important it was to buy fair trade products instead of products that don't have a fair trade label, also adding that we should even try to avoid the latter. We got to see multiple movies describing how even children are used for the production of those cheaper products. Some of my classmates who were rather emotional even had tears in their eyes when seeing how horrible those children got treated. Still this was not the only media we dealt with while talking about this: We read a newspaper article about how children get forced to do work in factories or in stone pits, how thus they don't have the chance to go to school. There was not a single student among us who did not understand that since-as they say-children are the future of a country, the political and thus economical future of those developing countries may be endangered at least for the following  generations aswell. In addition more and more teachers of social classes also ask questions about things that recently appeared in the news in their classtests and exams. I am well informed about the fact that a lot of newspapers and some magazines now focus on the situation of poor countries, also-and maybe especially-dealing with child labor. This also leads to the scientifically proven psychological factor that people want to help more-in this case by turning away from non-fair trade products. Some may be aware of this, while others aren't, but the more often a poor country is the subject of the news, the more it occurs to them that they can follow the change in this country thanks to customers-like them-only focusing on fair trade products.

Factors like these will make the selling of products that do not have a label identifying them as fair trade products hard if not impossible, according to what I've heard.

Thus it is just a well-intentioned, but also well-thought-out proposition I am making by describing the advantages of fair trade products in this letter. My message is just that I have good reasons to think that keeping your products instead of replacing them by fair trade products would do more harm than good. At least it is a worth considering suggestion and thus I hope you will take your time to think about it.

I thank you and I wish you a nice day.

                    Yours faithfully,
                                            Doris Schlapansky

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12:22 PM Mar 06 2011

Dorothee

Dorothee
Germany

Actually my intention is not to send this letter to any supermarket I know, but I wouldn't mind if you used this as some kind of guide line in case you are going to write such a letter one day.

I used this idea that just popped into my mind to find out whether or not you can write a real letter-leaving gaps wherever you want-in a blog too. Apart from that I may need to know about the advantages or disadvantages in at least one of my upcoming exams and I consider this to be a good practice to see whether or not I really can give enough arguments in favor of them, i.e. how well I'm informed about fair trade products.