Opposing Viewpoints

Fair Trade

Many big retailers in United States, Wal-Mart, McDonald, Starbucks, and Procter & Gamble, have been in fair trade movement. However, many people are not informed with the existence of fair trade movement that has become an object of critique for quite a long time. Fair trade is a movement that is intended to help local producer in developing countries to grow economically. Fair trade's objective is to give local producer a fair compensation with the amount of goods that they sell to the big retailers. However, many issues rise from this movement such as: local producers are not fairly compensated; fair trade actually kills local producers that are not able to compete; lastly, there is no clear evidence which parties are benefitting from this movement. Additionally, there are also other views that support fair trade movement such as:

As we have introduced earlier, there are two points of view about fair trade--fair trade is a beneficial policy or fair trade is not a beneficial policy. In this paragraph, we will go over that fair trade is not a beneficial policy. First, fair trade cannot reach all farmers. There are many farmers in the developing countries but fair trade policy can only reach a certain few farmers. Farmers, who are reached by the policy, are able to grow their business but farmers, who are not reached, will not be able to compete in the business anymore because there will be a technology/quality gap between rich farmers and poor farmers. Marc Sidwell, who are against the fair trade policy, said that fair trade actually slows down economic growth in developing countries because fair trade supports uncompetitive business between farmers and delays the information about diversification, mechanization, and other ways to improve farmers' business. Second, many workers that are certified in the fair trade did not receive the fair trade benefits. Fair trade is supposed to make sure that the workers are working in a better environment and receive decent wage. However, based on investigation of tea estates in Kenya, many workers did not see any benefits from the fair trade. Lastly, big retailers, who are proudly doing fair trade, might be the one that benefits the most from fair trade. By advertising fair trade products, supermarkets and retailers, such as Starbucks, attract customer to buy goods from those big retailers. Also, it is hard for average buyer to get the information about how much payment that actually poor farmers get and how much that goes to the retailers. Thus, fair trade policy is not an effective policy in helping the developing countries' local producers/poor farmers to grow their business.