Fair TradeFollow

I've heard of it. I imagine the standard perception of it is that it's a good way to spend extra money on your coffee beans and faded cotton t-shirts at Starbucks while feeling like you make a difference.

I don't have anything against Fair Trade but my usual buying habits don't put me in contact with it that often.

Edited, Jan 11th 2010 2:35pm by Jophiel

There was a decent push at the University of Delaware; a lot of local businesses pushed it, and student groups would frequently team up with them to advertise fair trade at events. Win-win, in my mind: the companies (many of which are locally operated) get free advertising via the student groups, the student groups get a way to get their name on campus, and the cause hopefully helps some small business folks in other countries.

Coffee was the big thing, but sometimes they'd have other products. The organic foods store had a lot of fair trade stuff as well.

I buy Fair Trade stuff when-ever it's available over other stuff. Since I don't drink coffee or black tea any more, it tends to be sporadic, rather than regular. The milk chocolate fair trade stuff I get occasionally is ridiculously expensive but freaking delicious.

I think that one of our most potent powers is to check out the specifics of what we buy, and then buy the healthiest, most moral, least damaging/polluting products, and buy those regardless of price. It can mean half an hour in the supermarket reading the labels on 15 different tomato sauces, but once you've established which one suits you morally, you can relax and keep buying that product line over and over, until a new variety comes your way and you can compare the two.

I buy two chutneys at a time. One is healthier (less sugar) and slightly more tasty. The other is also tasty, and is made by an Aussie Aboriginal co-op, partially using farmed Australian native fruits and herbs.

Yes. It's an organized movement.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Trade_certification

It's a way for sellers to bilk guilty white liberals from wealthy countries out of money. You're really just buying absolution in a strange sort of way. Very little of the extra money you pay for those fair trade products actually reaches the poor workers in the source countries, and there's quite a bit of argument that while it's slightly better for the poor workers who form into union co-op structures, it effectively kills the true privately owned businesses and any potential for upward mobility.

They're allowed a better subsistence living, but no potential to advance.

I don't think your average coffee farmer in the mountains of Columbia has much chance of becoming the next CEO of Folgers either way. Not that I give much of a shit about Fair Trade but I don't buy that it's keeping the man down versus the sweet deal he's getting from major US/European corporations.

I recently bought a fair trade jacket from wee Nepalese. It's cute and warm as all get-out , but I had to re-sew all the buttons because they started falling off after only the second time I wore it. Most of what I've seen from my jobs working with native populations involves textiles and artwork, and is having indirect cultural repercussions. I remember a girl from a village near lake Titicaca telling me that now that she was such a good earner, her parents wanted her to stay single for a while even though she was 15, and how she had her choice of suitors.
Natural Geographic has a great fair trade store.

Organic stores usually have a big FAIR TRADE sign over items that qualify.

I think it's better to buy local though. You're doing more to help your own area, support a local business, and you're cutting down on transportation costs to boot.

Choice: Fair Trade cabbage for $2.99 vs Locally grown (defined as within a 50 mile radius) organic cabbage for 99 cents -- I don't think it's even a question.

Most coffee I buy is fair trade. There is a "sweat free" label for clothing and, hanging out around college campuses for years, on occasion students ask that various campus items be made with this label.

Pretty much this.

I seem to remember some ruckus involving Starbucks and "fair trade" around the turn of the century, but alas, Wikipedia has let me down.

I said "more" Joph. Read all the words in the sentence...


Also, try reading the surrounding text for context. Like that the difference is replacing private business interests with government interests. We can argue whether one is better or worse, but in either case the little guys in the third world country are still subject to massive foreign control. Obviously, I think that control from private industry is less harmful than that from foreign governments, but that's just me...




Except that the market value of those goods only remains that way as long as the organization(s) involved in setting those standards continue to operate and sustain the marketing involved. In the case of a company like Apple, it's responsible for its own advertising, and thus it's in control of its own destiny in this regard. Here, you've got a situation where the farmers of these goods have virtually no say in or control over the practices and standards set by the international body which manages all of this. Yet, due to the existence of that body and its ability to market their label (and thus products which carry it), they exert tremendous influence over those end producers of goods.


It's fundamentally no different than a large corporation doing the same thing (buying up and marketing local goods for sale elsewhere), except that since the corporation is profit driven, it'll never offer a higher price for the goods than they are worth on the market, while the entire point of fairtrade is to do exactly that. In the former case, the producer can expect another buyer to pay a similar price for their goods if the first changes its mind or moves to another product. In the later case, the producer and their employees are screwed if the fairtrade folks change their minds. The size of their industry itself is artificially inflated by the guilt based marketing, putting them at an extreme bargaining disadvantage over time.



As I said earlier, this is the same basic argument between union and non-union labor. Obviously, we hold different positions on that issue.

I've bought some fair trade stuff. They have all the coffee sales at the University I was going to til last year. The coffee wasnt that good. Many of the items they sell (cept coffee) are the type that you can usually find comparable local offerings...and I'd rather buy local stuff.

My coffee I get from a local roster, though I'm sure the beans are laboriously harvested by over-worked children in Columbia and generously sprayed with eco-killing pesticides and herbicides - or maybe not. It's awesome joe.

Hell. I'll just start another post...

If you really really want to help poor folks in developing countries, you are vastly better off simply writing a check to any of dozens of charitable organizations who provide assistance to the people in those countries. You'll be helping the truly poor, and in most cases somewhere closer to 90% of your money will actually reach those people rather than somewhere around 10%.


Save your cash. Buy the cheaper coffee here. Give the difference to charity. You'll do more good for those most needy that way.