There was much rolling of eyes between Dot and me, when our local church announced a "Fairtrade fortnight". What does that mean, you ask? I'm not sure I quite know what it is myself. Fairtrade (yes, it is a brand) and ethical shopping are the latest fads doing the rounds.
It is all the rage to have the picture of a black person (who is generally quite well and happy looking, but with tatty clothes) with Fairtrade branding emblazoned across. The implicit message: Buy our products. Save the world. Especially this poor black man/woman/child. Pay more than you would to assuage your guilt about having more money than this black person.
Fairtrade is being pushed more as a brand and less as a concept, with everybody and his mate rushing to claim a slice of the pie. There are several aspects to trading fairly, and I know and understand only a few of them. Yet the policy seems to be 'lets charge more for average-ish quality and do a little group hug, snug in the feeling that we've faced up to poverty and done something about it', with the Fairtrade lot laughing all the way to the bank.
It'd be interesting to see a Fairtrade product that's superior in quality and actually priced lower than the "unfair" (for want of a better word) ones. It'd be interesting to see how many of the middlemen and importer profits can be cut, so that I, the consumer, am not the only one contributing to the the better prices for the producers, and to ensure that the prices the producers eventually get are indeed better.
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4 comments:
/"Fairtrade (yes, it is a brand) and ethical shopping are the latest fads doing the rounds"/
..along with Eco or Green products..heck, even Clorox (the Bleach Company) has managed to come up with something green.
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to be brutally capitalistic about this, fair trade should be abolished. For example, in the case of coffee, the reason why fair trade exists is because there is already too much coffee in the market and so the middle-men are able to strong-arm for lower prices. By putting a price floor, you just encourage more people to saturate the coffee bean market because now suddenly, they don't need to compete at market prices. This ends up causing flooding that further lowers price and also lets people who produce shitty beans get away with it and produce more.
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