Fairtrade are making an awful lot of hullaballoo about making a million and one swap outs over the course of a week – they want a million and one iterations of customers replacing their normal bananas, chocolates, coffee and whatever else, with the Fairtrade equivalent.
And gosh, isn’t that a worthy idea? I mean, everyone knows that Fairtrade gives farmers more money and is generally a good thing. Or something like that.
But as usual, the truth is slightly different from the marketing illusion:
Fairtrade effectively ensures that people “get charity as long as they stay producing the crops that have locked them into poverty”. Fairtrade reduces the incentive to diversify crop production and encourages the utilisation of resources on marginal land that could be better employed for other produce. The organisation also appears wedded to an image of a notional anti-modernist rural idyll. Farm units must remain small and family run, while modern farming techniques (mechanisation, economies of scale, pesticides, genetic modification etc) are sidelined or even actively discouraged.
Fairtrade director of communications Barbara Cowther admitted in the documentary A Bitter Aftertaste that the organisation had no real policy on mechanisation – this despite the fact that it is central to agricultural development.
By guaranteeing a minimum price, Fairtrade also encourages market oversupply, which depresses global commodity prices. This locks Fairtrade farmers into greater Fairtrade dependency and further impoverishes farmers outside the Fairtrade umbrella. Economist Tyler Cowen describes this as the “parallel exploitation coffee sector”.
Coffee farms must not be more than 12 acres in size and they are not allowed to employ any full-time workers. This means that during harvest season migrant workers must be employed on short-term contracts. These rural poor are therefore expressly excluded from the stability of long-term employment by Fairtrade rules.
I have been described as “a heartless sociopath” because I do not subscribe to the modern fantasy that it doesn’t matter what happens as long as your motives for doing what you do are kind and noble. Here we have some kind-hearted, generous people promoting a scheme that locks its members into poverty and non-members into even worse poverty, yet they are lauded for their actions, while my suggestions that we should just get out of the way and stop trying to help them and just buy what they sell gets me branded as horrid, unkind and deranged.
The world’s a funny place, really.
TJW is an itinerant blogger who lives in East Angular. He grew up as a fascist, mellowed into a Tory and was converted to anarchism in his middle age by the Devil's Kitchen.
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“…while my suggestions that we should just get out of the way and stop trying to help them and just buy what they sell gets me branded as horrid, unkind and deranged.”
Oh, you’re not alone in that. My usual response to ‘Fairtrade coffee..?’ is ‘Only if it tastes better or is cheaper’.
Which usually gets me a look as if I’d admitted to strangling kittens….
“I have been described as
I have long argued that Fair Trade is anything but. However, as long as people feel that by buying goods with the Fair Trade endorsement they are “doing their bit” the myth will perpetuate.
Alan: Your excellent response has certainly made me want to research Fair v Free more fully.
You’re not “horrid, unkind and deranged”
Fairtrade is just another facet of the do-gooders doing BAD. I resolutely avoid buying any product that displays the fairtrade logo.
I actually had dealings with this crew as a producer and all I can say is that they’re an expensive burden and utterly useless to the people they are supposed to ‘protect’. For a start you know they take a very large chunk of cash out of every transaction, so much so it is more than the farmer makes in profit after paying for seed, fertiliser etc and its that (instead of increased profit to the farmer) that pushes the price of fair trade products up.
Coupled with that they are lazy and arrogant. I know of a number of farmers who contacted them but only about 5% ever got a reply even after repeated emails. They force farmers into growing crops they are not necessarily suited for but won’t take products they don’t understand (which appears to be anything other than coffee).
They are typical smug metropolitan do gooders, with an eye to making shedloads of personal profit, who couldn’t give a toss about the farmers they are supposed to ‘support’. Thank you for bringing this to everyone’s attention.
U’mm – maybe that’s why the coffee tastes so bad.
Very thought provoking article, Anna.
I also was very much taken by the response from Alan.
Further reading is on the horizon.
Thanks both.
Joe
I used to buy it because I thought it was a better way to get money into people’s pockets rather than through governments or the big African charities. I don’t buy into that any more. I’ve figured that you’re just paying a premium, most of which is taken by the retailer/supplier (like charity christmas cards), so I may as well just buy better quality coffee.
But I don’t get some of the criticisms. If it encourages oversupply then prices will go down and some people will get out of it. Does it matter if it doesn’t encourage mechanisation? If they can work out that non-mechanised production puts more money in the bank because of some bleeding-heart liberals, then that’s their choice, surely?
No-one is forcing is suppliers or buyers into this arrangement.
Non fairtrade bananas are also getting rarer.
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