fatvegan

There is a New Internationalist magazine on Fair Trade floating around our house at the moment, and every time I pick it up something new in it annoys me. But I'm only going to complain about one of them. A section of an article Fair Enough? by Albert Tucker says,

So we stand at a crossroad in the journey to end the exploitative dynamics of the mythical 'free' market and make fair trade rule the world.

Albert seems like a very nice chap, and I agree with many other things he says, but I don't understand this. Fair Trade is an attempt to make free market principles work better by increasing the amount of information available. And that is all it is. Some of the surplus money farmers earn is then available to build communities and fund training programs, but those resources only arrive because of the increase in information. And spending money on things like those when the market is there would be predicted by free market models.

Maybe Albert is talking about turning "free" markets into free markets (without quotes). The Fair Trade model is a distinctly capitalist model, and I imagine makes a lot of economists very happy indeed. It's the sort of information market they throw in your face when people complain about the inequalities of capitalism. They will say that if people really cared about justice, then markets would jump up to tell us about how just various things were. Which is exactly what has happened. Deep down most economists want to be free-loving hippies, and despite all the evidence telling them justice is unlikely, they still mostly hope for it.

The idea that we are all individuals and are basically left to fend for ourselves isn't really an economic one. It's an ideological position of certain power groups who want to eliminate their opposition. Any economist will tell you that you should to start an organisation if starting it results in better efficiency. And I think it's reasonable to say that the Fair Trade labels have done that in a big way.