"Fair Trade" coffee is yet another example of people who may be well-intentioned harming those they seek to help through their ignorance. Free trade and competition have long been, and will long remain, the main drivers of economic growth and higher living standards. Interventionist schemes which deny this are doomed to failure. For those who seek to help the poor in other countries, compassion needs to be combined with knowledge and wisdom.

I agree, Faustino, good intentions are not enough to deliver good results, and in the case of distorting trade with developing countries, often have the opposite effect.

The ideological basis of the model of development that 'fair traders' are trying to foist on developing countries is evident in the conditions they impose - only non-employing farmers organised in collectives get to benefit from higher prices.

There are shades of cultural/economic imperialism in these efforts to manipulate the development path and business choices of poor farmers.

Am I missing something? Tim Wilson quoted figures of coffee being worth US$10 billion per annum on the commodities market, with up to 25 million farmers in the trade.

By my arithmetic that's $US400 per farmer. Per year.

That's $US1.095 per day. In other words, coffee-growing provides the average coffee farmer a daily income equal to the UN's official definition of immiserating poverty.

So you can re-arrange the deckchairs however you like, but unless there's going to be higher prices, or fewer coffee farmers, ain't nobody in the coffee plantations gonna prosper anytime soon...

...how is this really so very different from the colonial plantation days circa 1906? The farmers now own their very own poverty trap? I'm sure that's a comfort to them.

Yes, what this beautiful IPA article fails to note is that free trade assumes a 'level playing field'. Fair trade may favour certain types of interaction of producers with the market, but only because it acknowledges the historical legacy of years of protection from the so called 'developed' countries, and tries to rectify it, rather than insisting on countries opening up their markets to the whims of the global market.

Dingo1, free trade does not assume a level playing field, but it does try to promote one, in the interests of both producers and consumers.

The “fair trade” movement is an ideologically-driven (and to my mind, patronising and presumptuous) attempt to impose a specific anti-development business model on third world countries, supposedly for their own good. It goes much farther down the road of using the global market to subject poor farmers to the whims of westerners than free trade ever would

I've tried fair trade coffees but they are similar or identical in flavor to similar high quality imported coffees.

The fact that our urban liberals consider it more fashionable to agitate agianst foreign wars and send truckloads of cash overseas because someone says its "fairer" is a sad indictment on their attitudes to local issues of poverty, marginalisation etc.

Local causes go begging for money and volunteers, no-one marches in the street for the local impoverished, no-one gives a damn about our problems.........yet mention some war on the other side of the world and they will marshall untold depths of volunteer protest labor etc.

The local poor are the most forgotten folks. Our causes are unfashionable. Urban elites prefer feelgood causes that won't challenge their economic security or access to special benefits such as margin lending deductiosn or negative gearing benefits, or trusts to split tax to build funds for college fees for their pampered progeny.

How do I know all this?? I grew up in that class and am familiar with its way of thinking and attitudes. I since have spent many years behind the 8-ball. If you're local, poor and isolated, no-one gives a stuff but if you're some basket-weaver in latin america, you're a star.