fair trade

Hmmm, uou haven't really presented any evidence, so I've taken it upon myself to review the FLO website and read up on Fair Trade in general.http://www.fairtrade.net...Basically what you have here is socialism. I'll try to summarize briefly what the FLO is all about. The FLO believes that free trade hurts the poor because only the rich benefit. Food produced under this system is labeled with an FLO trademark. The products command a price premium as consumers feel assured there has not been any slave/child labor, unfair…. well, you get the picture. The FLO chooses a limited subset of producers that meet their criteria. Mainly they must be small, not have much hired labor, not use slave or child labor. And directly from their web site: "Profits should be equally distributed among the producers". The FLO also sets minimum prices to be paid producers. This is all a pretty big deal apparently (and I've learned a lot in this debate) so I thank my opponent for that. In the end, it appears the topic of this debate is "Free Trade vs Socialism". The following is a review of Fair Trade by the Adam Smith Institute:http://www.adamsmith.org...I'll try to summarize some of the more interesting bits from that document. In a paragraph comparing Free Trade and Fair Trade, the author writes:However, free trade proponents also seek to open up the economies of poor countries so that their citizens can participate in the world economy; Fair Trade proponents seek special protectionist measures for the poor to isolate them from the world economy.It's bad enough the FLO is fixing prices and having producers distribute profits equally, but it appears to me they are also preventing producers from plugging into the vary system that the "rich" have access to.One important point the paper brings out is how much effort is put into marketing and sales. That all sounds great but if they really wanted to help producers wouldn't it make sense to put effort into studying the economics of why these farmers are poor in the first place? Is the land viable for farming? Are the logistics and transportation viable? What farming tools are being used? The FLO doesn't seem terribly concerned with economics. I'll mention just a couple points regarding the price fixing and economics. One, only 20% of Fair Trade certified crops end up in Fair Trade labeled products. Two, only 10% of the premium paid for those products goes to the producer. Ouch. I doubt if consumers know that when they purchase the product based on the label. Another interesting point is that the Fair Trade movement is involved in setting primary education program. The following is from Fair Trade education document:Explain that more and more people are keen to support Fair Trade because it really makes a difference to the lives of the people who grow or make the goods we consume.Shouldn't we rather desire to teach our children to think critically about such matters so that, whatever the truth might be, it can be found out as generations pass? But in the end, we must ask whether the Fair Trade programs are affective. The paper points out that there is little hard evidence. Fair Trade instead tends to rely on anecdotal evidence.