Local farmers joined their counterparts from Africa and South America to advocate for fair trade last night at Emerson Hall.

Students sampled the farmers’ fair-trade products, including apples, lettuce, and chocolate-covered bananas, at the event, which was sponsored by five student groups, including the Student Labor Action Movement and Oke USA, a cooperative farmers organization.

After a lobbying campaign from the Harvard Fair Trade Initiative (HFTI), Harvard University Dining Services switched to fair trade coffee in 2002.

Fair trade advocacy has gained presence in colleges in recent years. The United Students for Fair Trade, a national advocacy group, opened affiliates on over 100 U.S. campuses within a year of its founding in 2003, the Boston Globe reported in 2004.

“I think people understand and feel that they have a relationship with the folks that produce the things they consume and that we want it to be an ethical relationship,” said Jordan Bar Am ’04, who founded HFTI as an undergraduate and helped to coordinate last night’s event.

A coffee farmer from Ethiopia, Tadesse Meskele, said that cooperation among farmers to send their products directly to markets could help raise living standards.

“The growers remain poor because of unfair trade. Farmers go barefoot and they don’t have the possibility of sending their children to school,” said Meskele, who is the founder of Oromia Coffee Farmers Cooperative Union.

Instead of going through collectors, distributors and exporters, Oromia has allowed farmers to bypass the middle man, thus raising their profits.

Sylvia Arevalo, another farmer at the event, described her poverty-stricken community of banana-growers in Ecuador. She belongs to a 350-member farmers’ cooperative, which exported products directly to consumers.

“This banana money makes it possible for the producers to continue to be farmers and not disappear,” Arevalo said through a translator.

Rich Bonanno, a local New England farmer, also advocates fair trade as a way to protect small farms from falling agricultural prices due to cheap foreign imports.

“The [U.S.] corporations are not the problem...Now my competition is in Canada and Central America,” Bonanno said.

While fair trade crops can be more expensive, Bar Am said higher prices may not deter consumers.

“You are paying more money but you’re also getting more information. With fair trade, there is the added value of transparency,” he said.

Bonanno is more skeptical, however.

“There’s a lot of people who say they would pay more for local products on surveys, but they rarely do so at a supermarket,” he said.