More Fair Trade Fraud?

Fair trade continues to lock people in poverty, but our colleges' dining hall providers continue to subsidize it with often disastrous results for the very people it was intended to help.

Such was the argument of a piece I co-authored early my freshman year in The Claremont Independent. Since then, the push has gone on for more "fair trade" products in our dining halls and in that stronghold of progressivism, the Motley. (Sodexho, Bon Appetit, and the Motley continue to support "fair trade." Most recently, Bon Appetit banned tomatoes over labor practices.)

The original draft of the piece I authored spoke about Guatemala and the banana growers that have been harmed by Fair Trade. Now, as I'm about to venture off to Guatemala for a little over a fortnight this January, I'm checking up on the place where parts of my family lives, I found a particularly revealing quotation from an executive at the largest the cooperatives seeking Fair Trade in Guatemala.

In Guatemala, an executive at Fedecocagua, the country's biggest Fairtrade co-operative, admitted that "after paying for the co-operative's employees and programmes, nothing remained of the Fairtrade premiums to be passed on to the individual farmers".

If the Motley and others are really interested in changing the situations on the ground for poor farmers, they should favor removal of the lavish subsidies that Western, unionized farm workers continue to promote their own well-heeled largesse over the lives of the poor.