There has been a huge proliferation of so-called "faire trade" products in supermarkets in the past few years. Their most famous label is Max Havelaar, which you can see mostly on bananas, coffee, tea, chocolate, rice and flowers from South America.
The principle is simple: buy produce directly from the small producers to avoid that a big part of their profit be taken by middlemen.
Here is why it doesn't work. Big distribution and retailing companies choose the cheapest final product (e.g. a chocolate bar) to sell in supermarkets, because it makes sense from a marketing point of view : cheaper price = more sales. This forces manufacturers to reduce their prices to remain competitive. To achieve this, they will buy cocoa beans from the cheapest importer, who will be cheap because they negotiated the lowest price possible from the producers in South America (or Africa or Asia).
In the end, the local producers end up selling at roughly the same price as they would have before to the middlemen, and big supermarkets are the ones that make extra profit by selling at a higher price the same chocolate, but with a label Max Havelaar on it.
Now this doesn't shock me. It's the natural law of the market, and I wouldn't expect anything less to happen. If people are naive enough to spend more money on a label that doesn't mean much, it's their problem.
What bothers me is that the so-called "Fair Trade" products are always imported from very distant developing countries, and never produced in Europe. This is disturbing for two reasons :
1) flying roses all the way from Ecuador to sell them in Europe at roughly the same price as those produced in Europe (because of the transportation cost) only worsen global warming. I guess it's ok for bananas and cocoa beans because they can't be grown in temperate climates. But flowers !?
2) I can't agree with a "faire trade" label that penalises local producers in Europe. Carrefour now sells fair trade flowers from South America when they could buy them from French (or other European) flower growers. That is outrageously not fair trade, because these big chains have actual power to seriously damage the European production by turning their back on their own country.
Conclusion : don't buy any fair trade product that can be locally produced. Or don't buy fair trade at all, because despite its good intentions it has (already !) become close to meaningless.
The principle is simple: buy produce directly from the small producers to avoid that a big part of their profit be taken by middlemen.
Here is why it doesn't work. Big distribution and retailing companies choose the cheapest final product (e.g. a chocolate bar) to sell in supermarkets, because it makes sense from a marketing point of view : cheaper price = more sales. This forces manufacturers to reduce their prices to remain competitive. To achieve this, they will buy cocoa beans from the cheapest importer, who will be cheap because they negotiated the lowest price possible from the producers in South America (or Africa or Asia).
In the end, the local producers end up selling at roughly the same price as they would have before to the middlemen, and big supermarkets are the ones that make extra profit by selling at a higher price the same chocolate, but with a label Max Havelaar on it.
Now this doesn't shock me. It's the natural law of the market, and I wouldn't expect anything less to happen. If people are naive enough to spend more money on a label that doesn't mean much, it's their problem.
What bothers me is that the so-called "Fair Trade" products are always imported from very distant developing countries, and never produced in Europe. This is disturbing for two reasons :
1) flying roses all the way from Ecuador to sell them in Europe at roughly the same price as those produced in Europe (because of the transportation cost) only worsen global warming. I guess it's ok for bananas and cocoa beans because they can't be grown in temperate climates. But flowers !?
2) I can't agree with a "faire trade" label that penalises local producers in Europe. Carrefour now sells fair trade flowers from South America when they could buy them from French (or other European) flower growers. That is outrageously not fair trade, because these big chains have actual power to seriously damage the European production by turning their back on their own country.
Conclusion : don't buy any fair trade product that can be locally produced. Or don't buy fair trade at all, because despite its good intentions it has (already !) become close to meaningless.
