Fair To Whom?
The Daily Mail hits at the "Fair Trade"certification in Britain again this morning. This time, they are reporting on the release of a study by the Adam Smith Institute that slams the entire fair trade movement as worthless marketing or something that is actually harmful to the most vulnerable people on Earth.
Last year, British consumers spent more than £300million on Fairtrade products.
But the report Unfair Trade claims that the organisation's "positive image appears to rely more on public relations than research".
It adds:
• Fairtrade helps only a very small number of farmers while leaving the majority worse off.
•It favours producers in better-off nations such as Mexico, rather than poor African countries.
•It holds back economic development, paying inefficient cooperative farms and discouraging diversification and mechanisation.
• Supermarket chains profit more from the higher price of Fairtrade goods than farmers.
•Only a fifth of produce grown on Fairtrade-approved farms is actually purchased at its guaranteed fair price.Tom Clougherty, policy director of the Adam Smith Institute, says: "At best, fair trade is a marketing device that does the poor little good.
"At worst, it may inadvertently be harming some of the planet's most vulnerable people."
Most damning of all, the report claims that Fairtrade is hurting the poorest group of all in the production process of its goods – the casual labourers hired by farmers to pick the bananas, coffee and cotton.
The UK executive director of Fairtrade whines that the report is beating them up for trying. (It's all about the good intentions, don't you see?)
Actually, the study, as reported in the story, isn't beating them up for trying. It is beating them up for what they are doing wrong. Is making sure that farmers get a fair shake a laudable effort? Well, maybe, although that is a subject that is debatable. But forcing collectivism is the surest way to ensure that they all get treated equally badly. The "fair trade" activists insist on only dealing with collectives. Winston Churchill's famous quotation applies here: "The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries."
The report indicates that the "fair traders" are very good indeed at making everyone miserable.
Left Wing, World news | Gaius February 24, 2008
By crosspatch, February 24, 2008 @ 12:41 pm
Yup. Let the market decide what "fair trade" is. The market itself will sort it out. The problem is that people attempt to use emotions to configure markets and that never works. Not ever.