So, according to moral guidance column in The Times, fair trade for coffee is roughly equivalent to a soccer club sending flowers to its players’ wives.
Um.
I don’t really have anything to say to that.
(I’d link to the article but it’ll be removed from view in a week and I can’t figure out a direct link anyway, so the full text is behind the cut.)
Modern Morals column, The Times, March 22 2005, by Joe Joseph
NOW THAT fairly traded tea and coffee are widely available to buy as well as to drink in cafes is it ever ethical to purchase these commodities from a source lacking fair trade accreditation?
As long as the commodity you are buying – whether it be coffee, tea, a shirt, singing lessons for Britney Spears – is not the product of any criminal activity, you are under no ethical obligation to prefer fairly traded tea and coffee over any other tea or coffee (just as you are under no ethical obligation to buy a wobbly table from a bad carpenter merely because he is, say, a volunteer lifeboatman); though it may well make you feel more virtuous to do so.
A coffee trader’s duty, in return for your custom, is to provide coffee that may have many worthy attributes – such as being strong, finely-ground, foil-packed for freshness, and so on – but these need not include being virtuously produced; just as when you watch Chelsea play football, the team’s chief duty to the spectators is to serve them skilful entertainment.
If a soccer club pays its players well, or regularly sends their wives flowers, that needn’t make a spectator feel any more virtuous for supporting the team. The reward for the soccer club, as for the coffee trader, is seeing its paternalistic care translated into better football, or better coffee. Packs of fair-trade tea and coffee woo buyers by pointing out how, in return for being paid generously, growers provide them with the finest, tastiest leaves and beans from their crops.
So while your purchase of such tea and coffee might appear to have an indirect moral bonus, it is economics – not ethics – that orchestrates such an outcome.
While I agree with you in general I think you could make a good case for the opposite, that there is an obligation on buying fair trade items.
You example of the table from the lifeboatman is not a good one because the lifeboatman lives and competes within the sqame society and so has the same baseline. The soccer club uis a bad example as well, for the same reason.
However having seen a tea plantation and the women with massive sacks of tea on their heads who get paid almost nothing, even by indian standards, to pick it it, I’d say that you’re assuming a level playing field where it’s exactly the opposite, it’s grossly uneven.
No coffee or tea are grown in the UK. Most of the crops are grown in third world countries where people are exploited to grow them. I would say that you should by fair trade items because then the manufacturer is making an effort to move away from exploitation and, after all your ranting on such things, I’d think you’d feel obliged to help them.
You talked about changing the culture of the world to a more liberal, equal culture and I said it might be possible in the west but not here. Well, if you aren’t going to support the meagre attempts that *are* made to change it here, then you’ll *never* see that change here.
Hmmm…maybe I have just argued myself into thinking I should buy fair trade items…
Matt – you have missed ~m’s understated point. There is NO correlation between flowers for soccer wives and fair trade coffee. None.
The article is vapid piece of media and I’m sure ~m agrees with both you and me, that fair trade coffee is morally right. How fair trade coffee ever got framed in a non-cynical morality battle with the excesses of huge business sport, I’ll never know!
I know I should buy fair trade, but the coffee is pretty crap, so I don’t. I do however buy organic beans when ever I can which generally has more financial recompence to the grower. Hmmm.
Chuck’s right – I’ve quoted the article, which I think is absurd. Shoulda made it clearer.
Siobhann, yeah, I think there are genuine issues to think about with fair trade. What if the quality sucks? How much effort to get it before it becomes too much effort? Etc. Pity this modern moralist doesn’t address any of that.
My mind is still boggled.
I also just noticed I misspelled your name in the Ani entry. D’oh.
Yeah – see I missed the point. Though there is the issue of should we pay mopre for worse quality simply because it benefits some poor farmer in the Andes, or the Nilgiris?