| | I'm sorry Jon, we had a misunderstanding, I wasn't acuseing you of anything.
quick review of David Ransom's
The No-Nonsense guide to Fair Trade
(Or more accurately the all nonsense guide to marxist economics)
In this book Ransom goes through personal story after personal story tugging at the heart stings of the reader while placing interesting guide statements like "Gregorio farmed coffee because there was no other living he could make." and "Although they like some 20 million others in tropical countries of the South - have worked all their lives for coffee, coffee has never worked for them." It goes on for pages and pages without direct economic proof, just emotional appeal for the little guy, then suddenly and completely out of economic context the reader is presented with an in text blub box that gives a few statistics wrapped again in guide statements.
In one such box that shows an image of a jar of coffee cut into four sections labeled Growers 10%, Exporters 10%, Shippers and Roasters 55%, Retailers 25%, speaking about the percentage of the final price of a jar of coffee that each party recieved from the transaction. With the following in the text meant to guide the reader to a conclusion:
"This leaves just ten per cent for the producers themselves. As a group, and in terms of the number of people involved, they receive far less than anyone else.
It is, of course, to them [the farmers] that fair trade is chiefly directed. But within current structures there is a limit on what can be achieved. The real costs of insurance, shipping, roasting, and distributon remain much the same, if not higher for fair trade because it is relatively small-scale and therefore cannot extract the advantageous contracts given to the big corporations, or benefit equally from the economies of scale.
That could be overcome quite simply, of course, if fair trade became bigger and more powerful in the marketplace."
(bold mine)
The reader is left after reading about all the hard work Gregorio puts into his farm with a strong emotional attachment for the small farmers fight to grow coffee on the mountain tops. So when we see the out of context statistic "Growers 10%" we scream out against the injustice of this market. Enter Ransoms solution to the problem, Fair Trade must become bigger and more powerful in the marketplace! Not entirely sinister unless we think through the economic consequences of what he proposes in his idea of Fair Trade.
In short, Fair Trade, as defined by Ransom, is the organization of farmers into co-operatives whose goal is not to seek profit for its members but to establish socio-economic and enviromental equality and happiness. The methods suggested for accomplishing this goal are two fold, organizing privately, which I have no problem with, and government enforced organization, tarrif raising, etc, which I firmly opposte. This form of tribalistic statist economics is no good for anyone in the long term and government sanctioned theft is hardly moral.
Ironicly, the "free trade" that Ransom rails against throughout his book is exactly what Ransom is advocating. Current free trade is more a tool for Statists to exercise their power in the world, it is not true free trade, it is more accurately described as Statist Trade. Both Ransom's Fair Trade and the current systems Statist Trade are of the same blood. The only disagreement they have is who will be allowed to exercise the power over others, the political class of the current system or the political class of the Fair Traders. Fair Traders are Statists trying to make themselves their own State to rule from and they guilt people into allowing it one cup at a time.
Regards,
~E.
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