Fair Trade

[Tommy-K]

My school have just got really big on selling Fair Trade products and they are proving to be very popular.

But I know there has been some speculation as to the true nature of Fair Trade and whether it does really benefit Third World farmers at all.

What are your opinions? If you want mine, I think it's just another Capitalist con. Yes it might make Third World farmers slightly better off, but not enough to be significant. It's just another way for the cappies to look like they are sorting out all the world's problems whilst they continue to rake in money while these people can possibly afford about one more meal a week than they previously could.

[Demogorgon]

The individua farmers who sell their products to fair tradecompanies do genuinely benefit. You shouldn't underestimate that side of it. Hoewever the thing that worries me about it is the way people may feel buying fair trade products is enough. It is not a long term solution. Also big companies are obviously smelling profit and are offering fair trade ranges which make up very litle of their whole business mdoel but make for good PR, and good PR is all it is there. And I certainly am not going to buy from a company like Nestle just because they have the odd fair trade product.

That being said fair trade chocolate tastes very nice.

[Andy Bowden]

Fair trade is still free trade.

[dannydandy]

Since fair trade products are always mroe expesive than the exploited products, they will never ever be the mainstream of the market, ousting the big corporations, or even stand long in the market. So it's gonna be failure in the end.

Pity that those who advocate fair trade could not see that the real power that would change the world is politics, not economics. The world economics is at free trade only becaus the political core of the world is capitalism. Only by shifting the mainstream political ideology to socialism can the whole trade thing be solved.

At the mean time, of course support fair trade products would help the farmers... but how many can you help? 1, 2, or 3? Without a complete remake of the world's system, everything will be futile.

[Janus]

Although fair trade products do present an alternative, the movement is not self-sustaining in that it still relies on capitalist markets and cooperation not to mention that the impact it has is rather negligible.

Previous discussions:
fair trade (http://www.revleft.com/index.php?showtopic=62580&hl=+fair++trade)
alternative to free trade (http://www.revleft.com/lofiversion/index.php/t54888.html)