Recent product-safety concerns have revealed the dark side of the global economy. Proponents of fair trade think there is a better way.“It makes perfect sense to buy directly from the artisan who made the objects,” said Peggy Brown, owner of Blue Heron Design in downtown Lee’s Summit. “I travel to Thailand and India to buy items for my store. I always ask, ‘Who made this?’ Then I buy from the people with the right answers.”

Brown and other small-business owners are finding ways to combine a social conscience through fair trade with a profitable bottom line.

Although “fair trade” is becoming a popular buzz phrase, the definition is difficult to pin down. Yochi Zakai, fair trade program coordinator for Co-op America in Washington, D.C., describes it as capitalism with a human face.

“Fair trade ensures that the person who made the product receives a living wage,” he said. “However, the concept is about more than simply selling products. It’s also about building a connection between consumers and the artists and farmers.”

That’s the approach Jan Denslow takes at Blooming Lotus, which sells body care and aromatherapy products in Kansas City’s Crossroads District and on the Internet.

“Fair trade is the purchasing of products that help ensure a living wage and safe working conditions for the producers,” she said. “I buy hundreds of individual ingredients, and I am extremely fastidious about sourcing each of them.”

Fair trade is simply about being able to sleep at night for Phil Thomas, coffee category manager for Parisi Coffee in Kansas City.

“I define fair trade as having a clear conscience,” he said. “If the minimum price is $1.21 to $1.41 a pound, we are buying it at $1.81 to $1.91. It gives you a clear conscience to know the price you are paying is fair.”

A clear conscience is nice, but it doesn’t pay the bills. That comes with extra effort, local business people said.

Brown started out slowly and increased her emphasis on fair trade during the six years she has been in business. Blue Heron began as a jewelry shop and then began carrying handcrafted items such as bags, candles and wood carvings.

Denslow, by contrast, made fair trade a top priority when she opened Blooming Lotus six years ago.

“I wanted to build a sustainable business on all levels — people, plants and profits,” she said. “If I couldn’t be profitable doing this, I would create an entirely different business rather than sacrifice my principles.”

Fair trade was more of an afterthought to Parisi Coffee. The roasterie, founded in 2005, sells to local restaurants and hotels as well as Costco stores in an eight-state region.

“It would sound more heroic if I said we meant to get into fair trade from the beginning, but that was not the case,” Thomas said. “The more we learned about the plight of coffee farmers, the more we wanted to work in a fair-trade environment. During our visits to El Salvador and Costa Rica, we could see that these people are very, very poor. We decided to work directly with the growers.”

Parisi Coffee went through a certification process to carry a “fair trade” stamp on its packaging.

Certification is readily available for most food items but is more difficult for other products. Standards for the body-care industry, for example, are tied up in litigation, which is why Blooming Lotus is holding off on having its products certified. Blue Heron relies on personal relationships with artists instead of formal certification.

Local businesses are succeeding by turning the perceived liabilities of fair trade into positives.

Brown, for example, is able to price her products competitively by sourcing and transporting them herself instead of using a wholesaler.

“You have to work fair trade into the cost of doing business,” Thomas said. “Coffee is a very remote industry, not a crop that you can buy 100 miles up the road on I-70. We have found that being connected to the origin enhances our credibility.”

The future of fair-trade businesses is directly tied to consumer education, said Thomas, who estimates about 20 percent of consumers are aware of fair-trade issues.

“As health food continues to grow and people are more aware of what they are eating, we definitely will see more interest in fair trade,” he said.