Slapped by the invisible hands of the market
March 31st, 2007 at 01:42
Hey! Are you middle class? Does your home have two cars parked outside? Perhaps the vicar comes round for tea occasionally? Isn’t life great when you’ll never have to worry about not being able to afford your next meal, or multinational corporations mercilessly exploiting your labour and forcing you into a lifetime of slavery?
But wait, what about those “brown people” on TV who are poor? You know the ones – they sometimes appear on the news between the important items about house prices and the dangers to avoid when buying your second property in Spain. They may be in abject poverty whilst you live it up, but don’t worry! There’s an easy way to absolve your guilt and clear your conscience! All you have to do is buy ‘Fair Trade’ goods and you needn’t worry about the adverse effects of your ultra-consuming self-centred lifestyle ever again!
Tell me if I’m wrong, but surely by promoting the fair trade brand and urging consumers to buy fair trade coffee, over say, Nestlé coffee, whilst actually paying third world farmers a “fair rate” for their produce and helping increase their standard of living, is at the same time is it not also robbing the Nestlé farmers of even the pittance they get anyway? Won’t that make Nestlé completely abandon their farmers if the economics of it go into the red as no one is buying it? Meaning that Nestlé farmers will lose their customer and their chance of selling their own coffee beans, even if it is at a dreadful rate?
It seems to be favouring one group of poor people over another. The only difference is that one of the groups of poor people don’t mind being patronised by smug couples who hold “dinner parties” and don’t mind spending an extra fifty pence to get their coffee. Yeah, I know I probably wouldn’t complain about being patronised if it were my only chance of subsistence.
Fair Trade, as in the brand, as far as I can tell in my capacity as an amateur economist and opinionated loudmouth, will never work. The neo-liberal world system is inherently geared against such high-concept ideas as “not screwing over the developing world”. The post-Keynesian system has created an almost irreversible state of economic anarchy, where if we even tried to achieve anything other than positive numbers on the balance sheet the rest of the world will screw us over (see: complex interdependence).
Unfortunately, the only way we’re going to be able to help the developing world is by completely reorganising the world system, both politically and economically. Which, er, ain’t going to happen, because us middle-class twats are blinded by consumerism and have too much to lose by instigating change, and the poor are too busy dying.
As for a vaguely workable solution, how about getting the EU involved? After all, despite collectively being the biggest provider of aid to the developing world, it throws down a massive subsidy to prop up its own pointless agricultural industries. It’s basically like if I were in a fight with you, and I gave you a sword to attack me with, but at the same time gave myself a BFG9000.
If the EU were to make one altruistic gesture (which it will never do, but work with me here, folks), it should completely dismantle its farming industries. It doesn’t need them. They only started subsidising them in the first place just in case a big war broke out which crippled food supply routes. It seems obvious, but I should point out that another World War is simply not going to happen. It’s either nuclear holocaust or nowt these days. And I don’t think in the event of nuclear holocaust the first thing on our minds is going to be about our sustainable food supply- presumably the first, and indeed last thing on our minds will be “what’s that bright white light doing coming towards me?”
So basically, my point is that fair trade is unworkable. Don’t get me wrong- I’m not pleased by this. It makes me very angry. The economics of it are incompatible with our globalised world, and no amount of bearded men in woollen jumpers standing behind a fair trade stall in a photo in a local paper is going to solve the world’s problems.
Reading this back, I think I must have had some pent up anger inside me. I think I’ll have a Coca-Cola(tm) to calm down.
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