Boycotting “Fairtrade”
Posted on March 9th, 2008 by Jackie Danicki
I’ve been boycotting them for years, and welcome Mike to the effort to lift more people out of poverty. (Sainsbury’s in the UK used to sell some non-”Fairtrade” bananas, and I always bought those. If they’ve stopped, I’d shun their supermarkets altogether.)
Filed under: Life
Jackie - they now only sell the cursed fairtrade bananas! Unfortunately, in central Cambridge, it’s somewhat difficult to find any other supermarket to shop at… the market might be the best bet for bananas..!
Interestingly, after reading this post and the one you linked to, I came across an article in favour of Fairtrade in The Guardian.
http://lifeandhealth.guardian.co.uk/ethicalliving/story/0,,2264187,00.html
Jacq, that piece includes some out and out falsehoods, such as “Fairtrade is not a closed system, it is open to everyone.” That is untrue; the program does not accept farmers whose operations are deemed “too small,” which rather goes against its stated aims.
Also, I’m sure those farmers are thrilled to be paid over the odds for crops for which demand has plummeted. But the fact is that you do not help people by paying them to produce commodities that are already over-supplied to the market. That is a sterling way of making sure they never progress and that they and their families are kept down for generations to come. I mean, would you have us subsidizing horseshoe producers at this stage?
See also: this and this.
It’s interesting to hear that some of the content is so suspect, since it seems to have come from the farmers themselves.
Coming from a fairly untutored position on the issue of Fairtrade (like most of the Western world, I suspect), it seemed to me that the points raised by the Fairtrade Foundation in response to the Adam Smith Institute Report were pretty sound. In particular:
“We do not deny that properly managed free trade between partners of similar economic strength and power has the potential to drive economic growth. It is the claim that free trade is the only way to tackle poverty that renders it nonsense in the real world of extreme global inequality. Those of us who have had the privilege of seeing and hearing at first hand the difference that Fairtrade makes to poor communities are not going to be persuaded otherwise by the rehashing of simplistic economic theories.”
Jacq, if you read the actual guidelines issued and upheld by Fairtrade, the discrepancies are pretty obvious. It’s not a matter of opinion, but of hard fact. Fairtrade is not, even by their own admission, open to everyone. It is closed to producers they consider “too small” to help. This isn’t my interpretation, but reality.
As for what you quoted, that’s only a sound point if you believe that free trade is something that needs to be “managed”. If you do, I’d be very interested in knowing why you think that.
It’s also only a valid point if you know nothing of the way Fairtrade keeps people in poverty. It’s a belief which - since I have provided pointers to ample evidence of this - does not hold up to collision with reality.
We’ll have to agree to differ on this one, Jackie!
Jacq, we agree on that! [insert smiley here]