FAIRTRADE IS everywhere. Not satisfied with conquering our own University, the goodwill mafia representing fairness in world trade is omnipresent in our society. The University of Bristol was recently stripped of its Fairtrade status for not stocking enough ‘One’ bottles of water and Ghanaian chocolate bars, and should therefore be ostracised from this bracket of universities who openly support the organisation. May they hang their heads in shame.
For those of you who have sipped on the water and munched on the chocolate safe in the knowledge that you are doing a good deed for someone on the other side of the world, I challenge your assumptions. Fairtrade is only fair to a designated group of previously defined suffering farmers and agricultural producers. It seems incredible to me that we can boycott the big nasties such as Coca-Cola and Nestlé because they are evil global companies who make a lot of money and mistreat their workers, which I do not doubt, but then instead of supporting these clear villains, we turn to a similarly global company who charges more money for products of varying standard, capitalising on our naive belief that by doing so we will be bettering someone else’s existence.
The first issue is how do we know that the money is getting to these people? It is similar to sponsoring a tiger or a small child in a far off country, when we routinely receive pictures from the child or tiger from time to time as a helpful reminder that we are in fact doing a good deed, disregarding whether or not it is the actual tiger or child in the pictures. However, in the case of Fairtrade, we do not receive helpful Polaroids every now and then, but rather persevere in the warm glow of a collective good deed done. We are therefore either very faithful, or very gullible.
Another problem I have with Fairtrade is cost versus value. We students need not be reminded that we have very little money as it is, but our Union, acting on behalf of the collective moral conscience of the student body, has chosen to provide us with little option but to buy Fairtrade products. The coffee may not be as good, and the food products may be of questionable quality, but Fairtrade by definition must be better. The effect that this has on our consumption of British produce, from a British agricultural industry that has been suffering from colossal mismanagement for the better part of two decades, is inevitably damaging. Biodiversity, hand in hand with the supermarket price war that lowers the cost of everything that is not British or Fairtrade, is ruining our home grown economy.
So we don’t know where the money goes, and by purchasing Fairtrade produce from around the world we might easily be having an adverse effect on British agriculture. What I really dislike about the moniker of Fairtrade is the moral assumption that it makes, coupled with the reaction of people when one chooses not to buy Fairtrade. It does not make me a sinner if I prefer the coffee or the chocolate made by someone else, even though I am provided with little alternative as these global do-gooders seem to have infiltrated nearly every shop in the vicinity of the University.
Trade has never actually been fair, and it probably never will be, despite the best wishes of all the charities that exist to promote this. What is certainly unfair is denying us the capacity to make a choice between Fairtrade and other products, and then stigmatizing those institutions or universities that do not follow the globalized line. When it is reduced to basic terms, Fairtrade provides us with an easy way to feel good about ourselves, and condemns those who do not.
Zoe,
Firstly i did not imply anything about human rights' issues, I'm glad you're involved with being aware and the like though but i really did not mean anything to do with that.All that i am referring to is the notion of communism and how your penultimate paragraph smells of socialistic values.These ideals are nothing more than fantasy and cannot function in the real world.
You are insulting many a person with what you said regarding the choice of chocolate bar, although i do respect your opinion but i must disagree with it.By lambasting those who choose to by a Mars bar (i hate the product personally) instead of the Fairtrade option, is just reckless. In this capitalist society we are free to do pretty much whatever we like and we shape our own lives; we can 'learn to earn' throughout life whereby whatever progress we make is thanks to individual ambition, talent and application. If people want to buy a bloody Mars bar then they can, and its up to the individual whether they feel bad about it or not. You nor anybody else should be able to say 'you should be buying this instead', even if its for 'a good cause'. That in short is the communism i find in your comments.
You say that your lifestyle is built on other's suffering; this may be indirectly true. We are all on a spectrum,we live in an MEDC and we live to the standards we know thanks to the work and suffering undertaken by our own ancestors. These people producing Fairtrade stuff are most likely in an LEDC and are in their plight because of the mistakes made by their ancestors and the continued mistakes they and their governments make.They do not need to keep having sex and producing more children than their system can support, I think if you read into things you'll find Mother Theresa brought about AIDS thanks to her work against contraception. These people do have my sympathy because they face difficult lives but they do not wish to be helped by our government, America's, Switzerland's,etc. How can you help someone that doesn't want to be helped? So many times they have been offered real lifelines and money to dig themselves out of the squalor and start living to a better standard, only to reject it. And yet, they are ever so happy to push Fairtrade upon us,asking us to pay more for what we already have. Were i to sell a pencil, of no superior quality, but at 60% extra of a price to the families in Africa etc, do you really think they would purchase it? They would surely think it is more 'UN-fairtrade'. These 'fair' products are unfair to us for asking for a higher price yet yielding no enhancements on the existing products, and they are too fair to the people producing them - I mean, coca-cola was banned/is banned (?) based upon wrongdoings associated with the company, so why is Fairtrade not tarred with the same brush? How many people do they have to kill in order to be banned themselves? It is proposterous.The sheer amount of men, women and children that have been murdered/beaten/raped by their fellow countrymen, along with continually spreading AIDS.
Life is just not fair,Zoe. You shouldn't be carrying the weight of the 3rd world on your shoulders. Fairtrade is fine as an alternative for those who wish to buy it, but have you really thought about the bigger picture if everybody bought Fairtrade? Not going to go on any longer but you can think instantly of the gazillions of jobs at big corporations that would be lost, families crippled financially and emotionally, etc etc. Fairtrade and your strong moralistic views that coincide with it are highly socialistic as they are centred around oppression and 'perfect world' solutions that would see society crumble.
If you want communism Zoe, go to Cuba.
Dear Mike,
Fair Trade does not equate to communism.
Clearly I was not advocating communism, I'm advocating more moral consumerism. None of my points relate to communism and one refers to democracy. I am also a member of an Amnesty International group which focuses on Cuba and Haiti, so I'm perfectly aware of the human rights abuses which go on in these countries, and can't see any connection between that and Fair Trade, It would be great if you could elaborate on your comment.
What a moany, badly-argued article. At least it’s easy to refute. In answer to the ‘first issue’, ‘How do we know that the money is getting to these people?’, why don’t you do actually do some research about the certification process and answer your own question. There is, for example, an independent Certification Committee, as well as a consultation process involving NGOs, traders and producers. Is the comment about child-sponsorship a suggestion that we should stop contributing to all charities because we don’t get a file of evidence breaking down exactly how that £2.50 donation was spent?
I particularly like the argument that Fairtrade is damaging our British economy by undermining the sale of home-grown products: Since when did Britain produce mangos, tea, coffee, cocoa beans, or many of the other products which are certified Fairtrade? I’ve definitely never bought a British banana. By nature, as you assert, Fairtrade does not have to be better in terms of taste. It is meant to be better morally. The extra cost is designed to ensure the original producers have an income that allows them to eat and educate their children. How many different Fairtrade products have you actually tried, seeing as they are apparently all ‘of questionable quality’? What about Burnt Sugar Fairtrade Fudge, called the ‘world’s best fudge’ by the Observer Food Monthly?
You refer to the ‘price war’ so you are clearly aware of the impact of supermarkets forcing farmers to produce for artificially low prices. Large companies such as Nestle, who force farmers abroad to sell goods for an amount which doesn’t cover production costs, have the same affect.
The two arguments about ‘cost versus quality’ and trade ‘will never be fair’ together amount to a flimsy attempt to deny all responsibility for what you buy. How you spend your money is to some extent a choice. Most people have enough money to spend 80p on a chocolate bar instead of 50p. Why not buy one less chocolate bar a week? Apologies if you’re in fact tee total and totally broke, but if not, you probably choose to buy more alcohol than you need, or a DVD or trainers that cost way more than they should. If you bought one less shot, you could afford to buy Fairtrade orange juice. Personally I find it disgusting that my comfortable lifestyle is built on other people’s suffering and I’m happy to pay 20p extra for a coffee if that means someone has a slightly better life in Bolivia. Indeed, trade will by nature probably never be fair, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying to make it fairer. We will never have pure democracy; that doesn’t mean we should give up trying to have fair elections. There will never be world peace, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t strive for peace as far as possible.
I hope you enjoy eating your Mars bar, contemplating your amazing 20p saving.