The Martlet

Choosing a reusable supermarket bag may be an eco-friendly move these days, but it could be hurting people around the world. However, there are options for those who want to save the planet, and the people in it as well.

“When you buy a supermarket bag, how come they can sell it for a buck?” said Kerry Hilton, 47, who founded Freeset, a fair-trade company that produces Jute (fabric) bags and organic cotton T-shirts for export while employing sex-trade workers in Kolkata.

The material, production, shipping and importing costs of a $1 supermarket bag don’t add up to Hilton.

“Somebody is not getting much,” he said. “It’s the oppression of people — a business of poverty. It’s people getting rich on the backs of those just making it through.”

Hilton, his wife Annie and their four children moved to India from New Zealand in 1999 with the singular intention of working with their neighbours. One stroll down the street taught them that their neighbours consisted mostly of women being exploited through prostitution in India’s infamous red-light district.

On the street, the Hilton’s met Mina Satra, one of the first women who would be hired by Freeset. Drugged and raped, Satra was tricked and sold into prostitution at the age of 12 in Bangladesh.

“Once that happens to you in that culture, you have nowhere to go,” said Deborah Morris of Victoria, who will move to India in January to work with Freeset.

Satra emerged as a leader in the business and her vision, which both Morris and Hilton have adopted, is to employ the 10,000 women exploited in the sex-trade living within a mile of their building.

Now eight years old, Freeset employs 161 women, providing them with fair-trade wages (double regular pay), a pension plan, health care, literary classes and job training.

“Business has a powerful ability to change lives, a powerful ability to bring community,” said Hilton, adding that, sadly, it also has the power to destroy lives when consumers make purchases without considering the effects.

Stacey Toews is co-founder of the Victoria-based fair-trade company Level Ground Trading. She said that fair trade is complimentary to, not juxtaposed with, capitalism.

“If you’re not profitable you have no mechanism in which to care for the people,” she said. “The two forces are very tightly linked, rather than being opposed.”

To find Freeset in Victoria, check out Lotus Designs in the Bay Centre, or visit Freedom Enterprises’ website, befreedom.ca.