Interesting presentation. Extremely well presented. We could do with more of this level of clarity. Shame it's a propaganda piece.
There were four key points:
1) Fair trade removes choice.
Well, yes and no. Despite the clear depiction of the ideological position, that employment is a contract freely entered into, the issue is a little more complicated than that, particularly for the poorest that the film claimed to be supporting. I don't think it's remotely sensible to argue that insisting on any kind of standards is somehow destructive to choice, and the film itself acknowledges that the effect is to move jobs, rather than reduce their number.
2) The price increase in fair trade is mostly captured by the retailer
Well yes, that's how it is supposed to work. The retailer charges more and gets to keep most of the increase. They then have to spend some of that to track the supply line and ensure compliance. The rest of the money passes to the producer, who spends it on compliance, worker welfare, increased wages (see below) and increased profit. If there wasn't the profit there, why would anyone participate in such a scheme? This is all laid out in the Fair Trade literature - it's explicitly a win-win-win deal.
3) Larger producers are better placed to meet fair trade requirements than smaller one.
Well, yes, they are. However, if the point was that most of the beneficiaries of fair trade schemes are larger producers, that would have been an easy statement to make. Any ideas why they didn't say that? A clue might be in the very quick cartoon of a list of fair trade requirements, one of which is that it is targeted at the economically disadvantaged. How does that compare with the implication the film tries to make, of a large scale producer with a big pile of cash? Is there a reason they imply this, rather than state it?
4) There is no evidence that Fair Trade increases wages
I suppose that depends on how hard you look. Taking into account that the main effect of Fair Trade is to reward those producers who treat their workers well and pay them fairly, and make them more competitive vs. those who don't, then it's entirely possible for Fair Trade to never increase individual's pay packet, and yet still have a net positive effect on wages.
Also entertaining were the little propaganda touches. The presentation of this as an educational establishment rather than a political argument. The portrayal of fair trade as being someone in the west not liking the idea of working in a dirty factory (never mind that very few coffee plantations have Victorian buildings with triple smoke stacks.) The attempt to link what was said in the presentation with development economics, without actually saying as much. The careful use of double standards, presenting employment as a choice without any evidence, but claiming there is no evidence for a wage increase for individual workers. This despite stating clearly that the effect is to move jobs from lower paid to higher paid countries, and despite much of the compliance work they are complaining about revolving around making sure workers aren't under paid.
All in all a very disingenuous portrayal of an ideological position.
