At the GSBI, I had a pleasure of meeting two wonderful women from India who are also working on livelihood and fair trade. One of them works on hand loom weaving and the other works on traditional handicrafts. A common issue among us and for fair trade products in general is that they are more expensive.

One paper said that the purchase of fair trade products are limited to the few who can afford them. Premium pricing keeps fair trade products from being accessible to the majority. Despite the desire to help, price is still a major consideration.

The question is, how important is price versus the inherent value of empowering someone through your purchase? How much of a premium are we willing to pay versus a regular product? Is premium pricing for fair trade products sustainable at all?

I'd love to hear your thoughts. Please feel free to share them. Join the discussion.

I came across an article, INERTIA, by Tobias Rose-Stockwell, about an experience he had in Cambodia in 2005. Below is an excerpt from the article that could have been written about the Philippines today. "As we drove back I thought about this country, about how history had deeply altered the way these people think. When a whole society is guided by the inertia of a single brutal regime, people adapt to survive. There is no social contract or guiding principle between strangers. If . . . years of violence taught people anything, it's that you keep your head down, you don't speak out, and you live."

To read the entire article, follow this link http://www.humantranslation.org/mont-serai.htm

While the brutality of our regimes did not reach the scale of Cambodia, we cannot say that they have been less damaging. The recent Maguindanao massacre is a terrifying reminder of the brutality that some of our countrymen continue to live with. The question is, Are we doomed by our history to react with apathy to the suffering around us? I hope to hear some dissenting voices - no we're not doomed to apathy! If not, how we can collectively snap out of our apathy, our lack of outrage, our resignation to what's going on around us? For answers to these questions and other thoughts provoked by this article, Join the discussion.

A hybrid social enterprise, to put it simply, is an organization with a not-for-profit arm and a for-profit arm. It seems to offer the best of both worlds. Will it work in the Philippines? What will it take to work? Does having a for-profit arm "dilute" the credibility of the not-for-profit. Tell us your thoughts.