Thankfully “Fairtrade Fornight” is now over. But if you want to remember why Fairtrade is not a good idea, especially if you are having it rammed down your throat by do-gooders and busybodies, here’s what Alex Singleton had to say in The Sunday Telegraph:
Despite Fairtrade’s moral halo, there are other, more ethical forms of coffee available. Most Fairtrade coffee is roasted and packaged in Europe, principally in Belgium and Germany. That is unnecessary and retards development. Farmers working for Costa Rica’s Café Britt have climbed the economic ladder not just by growing beans but by doing the processing, roasting and packaging and branding themselves.
But Café Britt is not welcome on the Fairtrade scheme. Most Café Britt farmers are self-employed small business people who own the land they farm. That is unacceptable to the ideologues at FLO International, Fairtrade’s international certifiers, who will accredit farmers only if they give up their small-business status and join together into a co-operative.
As Brian Micklethwait puts it:
Fairtrade is, in other words, a front organisation, crafted by unregenerate collectivists to con believers in nice capitalism to buy something which is neither nice nor capitalist. And the way to deal with cons is to expose them for what they are, so that only those who really do believe in the actual values being promoted here continue to support the thing.