So you're saying that fair trade coffee benefits "the white man" rather than the producers in the third-world country? That's exactly the opposite of what fair trade means.
Also, hand-made isn't fighting against capitalism, it's fighting against mass-production, sweat-shops and machine-people jobs like the ones portrayed on Chaplin's City Lights or even Discovery Channel's How It's Made.
No, but the price difference between buying normal and fair trade (as a consumer) is much larger than the price difference between the underlying coffee crop used in each.
Also, the Fair Trade people will only certify certain business structures (they're really big fans of cooperatives), leaving a number of small family-owned businesses out of their world-view. Not that cooperatives are bad or anything, just that it's kind of a narrowing thing to do. They're opinionated. You may or may not agree with all those opinions.
Fair-trade coffees are also subject to adverse selection. The really good beans can be sold to coffee fanatics on their own merits, at a price above generic fair-trade costs, leaving the inferior beans to be branded fair-trade.
This isn't to say Fair Trade is evil, just that it's... limited and has a few issues, and it's probably better these were discussed rather than covered up in the name of promoting an abstract unspecified good which may or may not actually justify the price premium. You may get better results by buying normal and giving the savings away.
Yes, because buying something from a non-fair-trade coffee farm is "kinda like" beating up an employee. In fact, for each dollar you spend on any non-fair-trade coffee farm, the owner not only whips an employee, he makes fun of the employee's daughter and calls her ugly. They'd all be better off if you didn't spend any money on coffee at all. Also this is true of every coffee farm everywhere in the world, except those few saintly coffee farms certified by the experts at Fair Trade, who always thoroughly research and monitor every operation and all sales of fair trade coffee to make sure that there's never any abuse or fraud ever.
... Sorry. Cause-and-effect doesn't actually work that way. A facile equation of non-fair-trade spending and employee abuse does not meaningfully contribute to understanding or remediation of the many and varied problems facing the many and varied nations of the developing world today.
Please. Can't you come up with a more meaningful, nuanced critique? The third world deserves it.
There has been ongoing evidence of both child and [child] slave labour being used in chocolate production [in West Africa]. For example.
>coffee farms certified by the experts at Fair Trade, who always thoroughly research and monitor every operation and all sales of fair trade coffee //
Research it yourself; and that's the Fairtrade mark (I've not personally researched other fair trade certifying bodies). I did. What I found was a rigorous system of monitoring. Once a firm has been well established and proven to be providing the proper care to their employees, providing safety equipment for example, I think they only send a person to inspect every 3 years - but, like I said that's after a long history of passing the rigorous testing.
Never any abuse? Doubtful, there's abuse in countries with strict labour laws that obviates (or should) the need for fair trade certification.
So then we come back to my metaphor (you understand the term and function presumably, even though you used it as a direct statement). I don't see why buying a chocolate bar should have me being part of a supply chain that includes child/slave/below poverty labour and abuse of the workforce (like spraying crops with pesticides when workers are working on them). Nor do I feel that we're in such a state of poverty as a species that we need people to be worked hard without access to sufficient funds to cover basic health and education needs.
So, you feel Fairtrade fails? That we shouldn't support people working out of poverty by preventing multinationals working for us from offering below subsistence prices for crops? That we should exclude people from getting educated and staying healthy in the name of greater profits for wealthy capitalists?
You appear to be worked up about my metaphor being imperfect; I couldn't care less about the metaphor. From everything I've seen Fairtrade works.
I've seen it before, it amazes me really, that HN has railed so hard against those that are trying to outlaw exploitative labour practices. Perhaps there are too many people here making a profit off electronics put together in Asian factories by underage workers who eke out their existence living amongst toxic chemicals working hard every day to remain in poverty?
He's saying that the main benefit of fair trade to the consumer is a sense of superiority or reduced guilt over those who drink "regular" coffee. That sort of benefit always strikes me as a bit of a "luxury good" as well, in the sense that the benefit isn't about the functionality or quality of the coffee itself.
There is of course a benefit to the producer as well, in the form of a fair price.
I imagine most of the factory workers on "How It's Made" rather like their jobs. They all seem to take pride in what they produce.
What kind of pedantic asshole cares if the main benefit of fair trade is a sense of superiority?
And it's quite something to claim the sense of smugness some people feel is a bigger deal than higher prices for farmers!
Humans are instinctive, not as much as other animals, but still quite a bit. This is no way news. That we are driven by all kind of social trends, rather than pure reason is also damn old hat.
I think I sense of superiority was one of the main arguments behind buy fair trade. So f-ing what!??!? If it gets 3rd world farmers higher prices for the same or safer labor, then seriously so what?
>What kind of pedantic asshole cares if the main benefit of fair trade is a sense of superiority?
> And it's quite something to claim the sense of smugness some people feel is a bigger deal than higher prices for farmers!
Whoa, please be calm. I didn't say either of those things.
I merely said the the main benefit to the consumer is X, and the main benefit to the producer is Y. I never said anything about the relative importance of X or Y. Of course, the key thing is that the farmers get a fair price.
The mapleoin post seemed to miss patio11's implicit point that there is a benefit to the consumer. That's all I was responding to. patio11 didn't get it backwards, he was just making a point from the consumer's point of view.
>Of course, the key thing is that the farmers get a fair price. //
As a consumer of fairly traded goods this is the main benefit to me; that my purchases aren't forcing other people in to abject poverty, uneducation and poor health.
FWIW in the UK nearly all major supermarkets have own-brand Fairtrade marked coffee (for example) and there are Fairtrade coffees at a wide range of prices.
Yes bastard capitalists try to leverage people wanting to do right by their fellow man for profit but when fair trade becomes pervasive they are no more able to do this than with regular coffees now. That is when requiring that workers are fairly paid for their labour and protected from dangerous working conditions is considered part of the product (as it is for goods made in Europe say), as much as a packet is, then it becomes harder for middlemen to leverage this moral position to increase shelf prices.
If your real aim was to improve the lives of third-world farmers, you'd buy cheaper non-fair-trade coffee and donate the money saved to an organization that helped those farmers more efficiently.
>So you're saying that fair trade coffee benefits "the white man" rather than the producers in the third-world country? That's exactly the opposite of what fair trade means.
Does Fair Trade really benefit all of the producers in the third-world? What are the side effects of Fair Trade? I think you could postulate that it drives down conventional coffee farmer's profits, since non-fair trade coffee will try and compete on price.
Wouldn't this lead to lower wages and higher poverty for the majority of the farmers?
I have no data to back this up. Anyone know any facts about this and care to share?
Factory jobs pay more than double the average wage in all developing countries. They are demanded by workers and much anguish is caused when they are lost.
This should be mentioned more often. Furthermore, people criticize companies like Foxconn for things like employee suicides, when the suicide rate at Foxconn is actually lower than the suicide rate of China as a whole.
Do you have a source for this? I remember looking into it a while ago and the only consistent statement was that suicide rates at Foxconn were lower than those of OECD countries, not China itself.
I ask because saying that the suicide rate is lower at Foxconn than in China as a whole is a much more convincing argument and I would like to be able to use it confidently in the future!
Foxconn has ~1 million workers http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/02/ff_joelinchina/all/1Although the company disputes some cases, evidence gathered from news reports and other sources indicates that 17 Foxconn workers have killed themselves in the past half decade. Or 17/5 = 3.4 per year per million people. You can play with the numbers several ways but it works out to less than 5% the suicide rate for China. Not that everyone is going to suicide at work, but having a job is probably cuts down the rate by a lot.
> Also, hand-made isn't fighting against capitalism, it's fighting against mass-production, sweat-shops and machine-people jobs like the ones portrayed on Chaplin's City Lights or even Discovery Channel's How It's Made.
That's capitalism. To be more specific, those are inevitable effects of capitalism.
The inevitable effects of capitalism as taken to the extreme, losing any sense of humanity. Which seems to be where we're going. However, I don't agree it has to be this way. Comments like yours push any form of capitalism into the bad stuff corner, throwing out the baby with the bath water IMO.
It's not that any and all forms of capitalism are bad, but capitalism has its benefits and its drawbacks. Obviously, there are lots of benefits. The aforementioned effects are some of its drawbacks.
I'm not sure why people have this notion that we can only take the good parts of capitalism and leave out the bad parts. It seems this is what you're suggesting--but how would we do that? Because when you do, you're most likely making the economy _less_ capitalist, and more of a mixed market economy.
You get the good parts of capitalism by not treating it as the end-all solution to everything, but using it as a tool where appropriate and curbing its excesses where necessary.
Seems that what you call a mixed market economy is exactly what I meant. It worked for a long time for quite a few countries here in Europe, until "free market" was suddenly considered a panacea for everything according to the ones in power. Before we got to the casino-economy of today...
I agree with you. I think the free market infatuation many US politicians have without truly understanding it is a major reason for our predicament.
That said, a free market is capitalism at its purest, and in a free market, we'll get sweatshops and the like (which are very sought-after jobs in developing countries).
I guess my point is: semantics matter. If we want to push back against these effects, I think it's important to realize we're actually pushing ourselves away from capitalism and more towards a mixed market economy, which is a good thing in my judgement. But we shouldn't see a mixed market economy and call it capitalism, because they're not the same thing--mixed market economies attempt to mitigate capitalism's negative effects.
That's capitalism. To be more specific, those are inevitable effects of capitalism.
I'm always wary whenever anyone says "That's the effect of capitalism", since Karl Marx thought that global socialism was the inevitable effects of capitalism. So which is it? Global socialism or expoiltative labour?
Also, hand-made isn't fighting against capitalism, it's fighting against mass-production, sweat-shops and machine-people jobs like the ones portrayed on Chaplin's City Lights or even Discovery Channel's How It's Made.