Fair Trade USA

Criticisms

There have been very few attempts at Fair trade impact studies. Griffiths (2011) argues that few of these attempts meet the normal standards for an impact study, such as comparing the before and after situation, having meaningful control groups, allowing for the fact that fair trade recruits farmers who are already better off, allowing for the fact that a fair trade cooperative receives aid from a dozen other organizations – Government Departments, Aid Agencies, donor countries, and NGOs, and allowing for the fact that fair trade may harm other farmers. Serious methodological problems arise in sampling, in comparing prices, and from the fact that the social projects of fair trade do not usually aim to produce economic benefits.

Fair trade supporters boast of 'the honeypot effect' – that cooperatives which become fair trade members then attract additional aid from other NGO charities, government and international donors as a result of their membership. Typically there are now six to twelve other donors. Critics point out that this inevitably means that resources are being removed from other, poorer, farmers. It also makes it impossible to argue that any positive or negative changes in the living standards of farmers are due to Fairtrade rather than to one of the other donors.

Booth says that the selling techniques used by some sellers and some supporters of Fairtrade are bullying, misleading and unethical. There are problems with the use of boycott campaigns and other pressure to force sellers to stock a product they think ethically suspect. Some people argue that these practices are justifiable: that strategic use of labeling may help embarrass (or encourage) major suppliers into changing their practices. They may make transparent corporate vulnerabilities that activists can exploit. Or they may encourage ordinary people to get involved with broader projects of social change.

There are complaints that the standards are inappropriate and may harm producers, sometimes imposing months of additional work for little return.

There have been claims that adherence to fair trade standards by producers has been poor and that enforcement of standards by Fairtrade is very weak, notably by Christian Jacquiau and by Paola Ghillani, who spent four years as president of Fairtrade Labelling Organizations There are many complaints of poor enforcement problems: labourers on fair trade farms in Peru are paid less than the minimum wage; some non-Fairtrade coffee is sold as Fairtrade 'the standards are not very strict in the case of seasonally hired labour in coffee production.' 'some fair trade standards are not strictly enforced' supermarkets avoid their responsibility. In 2006, a Financial Times journalist found that ten out of ten mills visited had sold uncertified coffee to co-operatives as certified. It reported that "The FT was also handed evidence of at least one coffee association that received fair trade certification despite illegally growing some 20 per cent of its coffee in protected national forest land. A lot of volunteers do unpaid work for firms, or market fair trade in schools, universities, local governments or parliament. Crane and Davies' study shows that distributors in developed countries make 'considerable use of unpaid volunteer workers for routine tasks, many of whom seemed to be under the (false) impression that they were helping out a charity.' Other critics in the Fair trade debate claim that the volunteers cannot know what fair trade does achieve and what harm it does, because the information is concealed from them.

Segments of the trade justice movement have also criticized fair trade in the past years for allegedly focusing too much on individual small producer groups while stopping short of advocating immediate trade policy changes that would have a larger impact on disadvantaged producers' lives. French author and RFI correspondent Jean-Pierre Boris championed this view in his 2005 book Commerce inéquitable.