It's a sign of success I suppose that fairtrade is now getting its wannabes, including Kraft and Nestle. BUt be careful:
"Kraft is proposing to pay farmers who adhere to its ethical criteria a 20% premium on the price of green coffee beans on the open market, which this year was about 65 US cents (about 35p) a pound. The payment would be significantly less than the flat rate of $1.21 paid to farmers under the Fairtrade scheme."
Nearly but not quite. And the problem may be that the truly sustainable may have trade siphened away by the wannabes. However, I guess we should cheer [if only one or two out of three] that there is some progress.
Asked why Kraft is proposing to offer farmers substantially lower returns than the Fairtrade scheme offers, the US firm said: "We believe the majority of consumers are not willing to take the premium we would have to charge if we were to convert to the Fairtrade system."
Er, quite. or as one of the guys in the white hats said in the article:
"If people are not making enough to send their children to school they are not going to be preoccupied with long-term issues around damage to the environment."
Anyone say 'Ethics lite'?
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Forget Maxwell House. Would you like a cup of Kenco Sustainable?:
22 November 2004
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Thanks Alex -your own article I take it? You are right, I think that we do need to be looking at a world beyond coffee production and I think that part of the point of the fair trade thing is that by supporting community development it does just that; I may have got hold of the worng end of the stick here, but I don't think fairtrade is about lociing communities in to coffee production or anything else. I would still rather, given that I have not given up my coffee habit, know that my money is supporting more sustainable development than further contributing to the poverty cycle. The problem with what you say is that it seems to say 'forget fair trade' which means leaving people at the mercy of market forces that they have not the capital of infrastructure to withstand when it goes bad. It's all very well saying that the price-drop recently is a signal to get out of the market but we're not talking social security while they find other work and given that developing nations have a huge unemployment problem I'd rather be trying to help than relying on a creaky and humanly inefficient system such as global capitalism which will probably force them to into favelas, townships and barrios in cities ill-able to support them but appear to offer hope wheas rural poverty doesn't. I do agree though that it is important to gear people up for other work too; however, I think that is part and parcel of the fair trade scheme whereas the firtrade lite schemes don't seem to be too keen on making it possible for their producers to have a life outside coffee production ...
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