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SURVIVALsp1

Starbucks sells fair trade coffee beans; Trader Joes sells fair trade fruits; and Whole Foods sells fair trade rice. Fair trade products are popping all over venues across America. However, what makes fair trade fair?

Fair trade promises to provide farmers and farm workers opportunities to empower their economic circumstances. By investing in their farms and communities, ensuring fair labor conditions, and protecting the environment; fair trade hopes to exchange products for a reasonable price in the global marketplace.

Despite noble motivations behind fair trade, not everyone thinks it is a fair solution. Some economists claim that there are broader economic ramifications that are quite harmful to farmers and developing countries in the long-run. For example, fair trade products, like coffee, have a low price simply because of overproduction. By paying farmers a fair trade premium, it encourages other farmers to produce coffee, which ends up driving the overall prices down and making non-fair trade producers in these countries even poorer. What exacerbates the problem is that with a guaranteed premium, governments and farmers in developing countries have less of an incentive to diversify their crops. Hence, this makes fair trade counterproductive. Developing countries cannot achieve higher levels of economic growth because their economies are too heavily dependent on these primary products.

Nevertheless, in recent years, there has been a lot of activism by various organizations to introduce fair trade products. While these groups should be extolled for their effort in trying to help coffee farmers in developing countries, for instance, it is important to consider the short and long-term repercussions of this international campaign.

So this question once more is, should fair trade be banned?

ziron

Postmaturnally, You will find that fair trade is truly the closest thing to communism that should ever be able to be used. Yes it is an interesting idea, and it will be nice to see how it folds out in these coming years,

Now anyone up for a game of waffleboard and a small dine in at a resturaunt?

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Legacyweapon

Welcome to capitalist America, you cant regulate how much people sell their goods.

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