Can Fair Trade Really Be Fair Essay

769 Words4 Pages
Can fair trade really be fair? Admittedly, fair trade has several shortcomings. Firstly, fair trade makes farmers become over-dependent social groups. In fact, farmers are not learning the real skills for them to survive, in contrast, they are becoming depend on fair trade organizations to gain limited income. However, under such circumstance, farmers are fragile to suffering from financial crisis because of their negative position. According to Jeffery(2012), farmers are just receiving another form of subsidy from fair trade organizations and they rely on those help more than before. Therefore, for majority of impoverished people, even establishing their own small business is a difficult task for them to realize, for they lack of affluent…show more content…
Thus, even they are very hard-working, poor people are still living in a poor condition.Secondly, types of products are too limited. Majority of goods in fair trade are agricultural products and handicrafts, such as coffee, bananas and sugar. To some extent, this scale is too small to cater to demands of market and to reduce poverty effectively. After all, the number of impoverished people in this world is tremendous and they can form to be relatively strong fair trade organization participants, it might a huge task to tackle the demanding problem with small scale of fair trade. Thirdly, management system in fair trade can hinder the profits of income to producers. In the whole process of fair trade, there are three major members in the transaction, producers, retailers and consumers. This means that whether the excessive payment from consumers are used to pay for certification of fairtrade organization or for producers is a question. In this case, fair trade may not be real fair for consumers and producers because of those hidden aspects. For consumers, there is a possibility that even expensive costs they have paid, the quality of products are still unreliable. For poor producers, final selling price of those commodities might be several

More about Can Fair Trade Really Be Fair Essay

Open Document