How to Improve Fair Trade: #9

Summary of Concerns About Current ?Fair Trade?

The ?fair trade? movement is full of people that care about local communities and the global village.  It is also full of good intentions.  What concerns me is that intentions don?t always heed their desired result.

Currently, I am displeased with how much these principles of ?fair trade? favor special interests and hurt small businesses and low-income buyers.

These principles assume human nature is different if you are a producer or a buyer or a worker; yet often the workers, producers and buyers are the same people.  These current principles of ?fair trade? treat people like they change personalities throughout the day.  The public is considered accountable yet a worker is considered incompetent to look after herself.  If someone favors sustainable development and good working conditions they are assumed less likely to grant privileges to special interests.  If someone is a producer they are more likely to need assistance than a buyer.  And if someone is a worker (regardless of what they do because they should be provided a job) they have more rights than the person providing them work and all of the buyers who are just trying to make a living purchase.

After it is established that the same people behave differently and have different rights at different times of the day, all of the industries they work in, the products they create and trade relationships they form are considered to be homogenous.  It is then proposed that all of these relationships will function best if we are to constrict the diversity of their nature to a few chosen relationships.

It is very important that we revise the principles of the current ?fair trade? movement and make them more sound.  At the moment, they are a mess of contradictory claims that don?t even support the ends we are fighting for.