I should clarify that I have nothing against the Fair Trade movement per se. In fact, I’m drinking fair trade coffee as I write. Equal Exchange Coffee does a great job in finding a market niche for superior product and in turn supporting Third World farmers in smaller-scale agriculture. In fact, their approach - of intervening in commodity markets notoriously harsh on Third World farmers by paying above world commodity prices- seems to me to be the way that fair trade can be most helpful. They even seem to be having an effect on bigger players in coffee distribution. At the same time, retailers like 10,000 Villages very likely are expanding the market for developing world handicrafts. This in itself is a good thing.
Nonetheless, often fair trade is presented as an alternative to free trade. The implicit or explicit claim is that trade liberalization won’t ever help the third world since it simply relies on cheap labor and what’s needed instead is a consumer movement in the first world to pay above-market prices for third world goods. But while paying above-market prices can be beneficial in itself, it chips around the problem facing the Third World (growing population with stagnant labor productivity) rather attack it head on. “Think Globally, Act Locally” becomes a battle-cry for absolving the need for large-scale global action, or at best puts it off to some out-of-reach political victory for the left. In sum, fair trade becomes an ideology, every bit as powerful and distorting as the ideology of social mobility or of entrepreneurship (the ideology that American capitalism is the lemonade stand writ large). I’m still surprised that the left - who should be adept at reading political movements ideologically - can’t see the ideology forming under its own nose.
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