At Cafe Bibliotech, where I work, we sell Ethiopian Fair Trade coffee.The university wears the sale of such coffee as a badge of honor.However, my skeptical side has me wondering.
First, some background. Fair Trade organizations, among other services,set a minimum price that producers will earn for the coffee beans theyare producing. By doing so, they shelter impoverished producers fromvolatile fluctuation in coffee prices, which can be especially damagingbecause of the lag time involved in producing coffee beans. It takesabout five years to grow a fully producing coffee tree.
I have my doubts about Fair Trade. The laws of supply and demandclearly show that when prices are kept at a level above equilibrium,bad things happen. People are encouraged to start growing and sellingcoffee who would otherwise do something else. At the same time, lesspeople are willing to buy coffee at the higher price. When thishappens, more coffee is being produced than is being demanded. Many ofthe producers are left with unsold coffee beans.
I am not going to go out on a limb and condemn Fair Trade. Ithink its a very complicated issue on which experts much more educatedthan I disagree. However I am instinctively wary of solutions to socialproblems that feel the need to emphasize their own moral virtue. [url=http://www.transfairusa.org/content/about/overview.php]The Fair Trade Website[/url] promotes itself by saying what it does isjust and achieves positive ends. This mirrors my experiences talking toproponents of Fair Trade. Generally, the conversation is a normativeone, with the proponent expressing how the program is designed to helpthe impoverished, rather than an analysis of the effectiveness of FairTrade. I am not saying proof of effectiveness does not exist, but if itdoes, shouldn't it be the main selling point rather than an argumentbased on values most people agree on anyway?
Fair Trade inextricably marries its moral values with its strategy forpoverty alleviation. The name says it all. By calling it Fair
fairtraders make a value judgment that trumps any specifics about theeffects of the policy. Fair Trade becomes framed as something that isabout right and wrong, justice and injustice, not about cause andeffect. By doing this, a lot of people are attracted to the movementbased on the values it espouses and tend to not pay as much attentionto the more tedious and harder-to-explain nuts and bolts of thestrategy's impact. It also makes Fair Trade a lot harder to criticize.When Fair Trade makes its means synonymous with its ends, it makes itvery hard to criticize the means specifically.
Surely there is a need to emphasize the importance of fighting poverty.But the values rhetoric needs to be dropped while discussing how toaddress the issue. It stifles pragmatic arguments about what are goodsolutions and what are bad solutions. No one wants to be labeled as forunfair trade.[url=http://www.transfairusa.org/content/about/overview.php][/url]
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Graham Bowman
