Why Fair Trade Isn't A Fair Shake

in #blog5 years ago

Small farmers are integral to the environmental movement because they are our connection to the land and make the decisions about what goes into our food. But life as a small farmer is not easy, especially in developing countries. Growing crops is labor intensive and the yield is usually unsustainable. Add in the unpredictability of weather and storms and one wonders why anyone would choose such a lot in life.

The truth is that most farmers in developing countries don't choose to cultivate the land but are rather forced to out of economic necessity. They need to make a living, no matter how inadequate. And it is certainly inadequate; most don't make enough money to feed their families all the time. Yet our consumer culture dictates that they must keep growing, because the food and other goods they produce supply all the items that we deem essential to our qualities of life.

Twenty-five years ago, in response to this problematic situation, the Fair Trade global cooperative arose to help Third World growers out of poverty by paying them above-market prices for crops. The most prominent advocate of Fair Trade is Starbucks, the world's largest purchaser of Fair Trade-certified coffee. This year, Starbucks pledged to double the amount of Fair Trade beans it buys to 40 million pounds, which amounts to approximately 40 percent of all the Fair Trade coffee imported by the United States.

So, in order to understand how the Fair Trade cooperative works, let's take coffee as an example. Fair Trade charges the retail customer $10 per pound of coffee so that it may give the farmer $1.55 per pound.

But here's the catch: that's only about 15 cents higher than the current market rate. And with Fair Trade cooperative fees, taxes, and expenses, the farmer is left with only 50 cents per pound; this amounts to about $1,000 a year. I can't live on $1,000 a month, let alone depend on that amount of money, which in coffee-producing Guatemala would be about half the minimum wage, to feed an entire family for a year .

What latte-sippers who congratulate themselves for buying Fair Trade coffee don't understand is that it's just not enough. We have a huge disconnect in our society in that we delegate our worst jobs, like growing coffee beans, to impoverished nations and then feel we can dictate the terms of their work (organic, human, cage-free, no antibiotics, etc.). It's an unsupportable system, and we need to fix it if we're going to make any progress on reaching a more sustainable way to live on this planet.


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I'm not saying anyone should stop buying Fair Trade goods. I think it's a commendable response to an ailing system. But we need to look beyond the labels like "Fair Trade" and "organic" that seem only to lull us into complacency and address the system itself.

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