Fair trade

Some time ago I was in Brazil and we visited my daughter-in-law's parents who owned a lemon farm. Hectares of small 3 metre high lemon trees in neat rows. There were a lot of trees and good crops of lemons, and being in the tropics they were not subject to quite the same seasonal on/off cycles that agriculture has here. But they were barely above the subsistence level. They had no car, a broken TV set that would only get one channel, old clothes and a ramshackle house. I'll not call it a farmhouse because that would give you the idea of a large dwelling like our own farmhouses. No, it had a small kitchen, a small living room and a small bedroom. Outside was a loo and a shower (cold). They showed me the lemons that they produced, packed up neatly in 10Kg sacks, waiting for the lorry to collect them. They told me they got 19 centavos a sack. That was about 12 US cents or 8p/sack. Lemons were 19p each in Sainsbury's then. The contents of the sack they sold for 8p was fetching 1900p = £19.00. It did occur to me that had they been give 16p for their sacks of lemons the price at Sainsbury's would only need to be increased by less than 1/10th of a penny to cover it. But it would have made one heck of a difference to them. Doubling their income at a stroke.