Fairtrade – Caring or greed?

Fairtrade claims to be a better choice for the producers, but is it really as good as it seems?

Fairtrade gives the producers better conditions so that they earn more money from each sold product. That will make them able to grow and make their system more efficient, but at the same time the conditions for the producers that don't get chosen for Fairtrade will be a lot worse and they will have it a lot harder to survive. Despite the fact that the products are approved by Fairtrade, what good will it do in these times when the biggest problem around the world is climate change? When barely 30% of all the Fairtrade products are ecological. Is that a price we're willing to pay since Fairtrade products are a lot more expensive than the normal groceries?

Even though they claim Fairtrade is fair, it's really just less unfair than before. For example, the French Ecological magazine Silence has calculated that a Fairtrade certified coffee producer from Colombia only gets 4 euro more a month compared to a normal producer. Compare this to the cost of up to 33 euro to be a certified Fairtrade producer, and you will get a difference that's only 15 euro a year between a normal producer and a Fairtrade certified one.

The Dutch company Max Havelaar has according to the French National Institute for Statistics and Economic Studies during 30 years put more than 100 000 companies out of business, in France only, because of mass distribution stores. But maybe that's the only thing to do when the price for the companies to put the Fairtrade label on their product is about 2 percent of the market value that they'll have to pay to the FLO organization. That means that during the last 3 years the Swedish coffee producer Löfbergs Lila has paid more than 80 000 Swedish kronor to the Fairtrade association, and still Löfbergs Lila only have 17 percent of the Swedish coffee market.

The most of the Fairtrade producers are located in Mexico, an already quite developed country, while only the poorest places in Africa are included. The ones that are just “poor” are not included in Fairtrade even though their conditions often are worse than in Mexico. Why's that?

When the children work they get experience that most of the western factory employees lack at the same age. If they don't work and go to school instead they will lose the lead they've earned after so many years of hard work. And since Fairtrade doesn't allow child labour, what will they do when they don't have a job and can't go to school because they still don't have any money? I mean, how can an education help when there's no jobs that require it in their area? Anyway, since 1 of 6 children in the world are involved in child labour, many of them as soldiers in armed conflicts and as commercial sex workers. What's really best? That the kids work in a factory for a low salary... or that they will be trained to soldiers or used as sex slaves without any payment? And when you're thinking about that, consider that nowadays 8,6 million children are trapped in prostitution, but how many will it be if the other 246 million illegally working children will get fired from their factories?

Finally, would you really like to pay more money for something like this? Fortunately, that's not my choice to make...