The BBC recently picked up on the fair trade theme with this article (thanks to SupraDeluxe for the heads up) picking up the responses to Fair Trade of Alex Singleton (Adam Smith Institute) and Paul Ettinger (commercial director of Caffe Nero).
In many ways their comments are reminiscent of many opponents of the fair trade movement, with nods of the head to the apparent ideals of free markets, but the thing that really struck me was a major discrepancy between their two comments. While Singleton comments that:
“The problem that Fairtrade faces is that it just doesn’t address market realities, that coffee is going to get a lot cheaper.”
While Ettinger claims:
“If they stopped subsidies, the market would set the price, and organisation such as Fairtrade would cease to exist because the prices would increase overnight.”
It is easier to understand why free trade would benefit the poor if Ettinger is correct, but the disparity leaves me wondering where these two apparent experts get their data, and seems to supply more evidence that the concern for ‘free trade’ is driven by ideology at least as much as is ‘fair trade’.
Looking back at the article we see that same ideological bias in comments on the differences between Guatemala’s labour-intensive coffee production and Brazil’s more automated approach. Here Singleton comments:
“There is no long-term future for the Guatemala model, it’s just not economically efficient”
It’s the ’economically’ qualifier here which gives things away and gets to the heart of the issue. Advocates of fair trade, and beyond that reform of international trade rules, are looking for reasoning that goes beyond economic efficiency to explore what works for communities in a holistic way: culturally and socially, not just economically.
Personally, I’m left wondering what the point of economic efficiency is. In the wake of unprecedented economic growth, can’t we afford to slow down and invest in values which aren’t quite so easily measured?