Fair Trade - just another business

Last weekend I went to a Fair Trade event and I have a few things to say...

For those who do not know what Fair Trade is I will start by explaining: Fair Trade is an organization – in fact it is a business – which provides better salaries to producers of the so called 3rd world countries. The products include coffee, cocoa, tea, honey, olive oil, etc... – mainly food products, clothes, as well as handicraft.

So, the deal is: the products are better quality and they are substantially more expensive in comparison to non Fair Trade products.

Because the products are more expensive it is possible for the producers to have a better salary than if they weren’t producing a “fair trade product”. This reveals an interesting thing: virtually all other products of big companies do not pay their producers/workers properly.

Fair Trade products are quite more expensive – even though they say it is just “a few more pennies” (a few hundred more pennies they mean) – which means that only people with a substantial salary (not my and many more millions of people’s case) can afford to buy them regularly.

More – if the products cost more (sometimes twice as more) and the only difference is that the workers receive more, that means that the whole business structure is still the same – in other words: it is still profit driven like any other business. “If the products do not sell they will not stay on the shelves” they said – again, like any other product.

So in the end what we have here is an attempt of fixing a problem (extremely low salaries) with a solution based on that which created the problem itself in first place: an economic system based on profit (and greed).

I am not attacking Fair Trade or anyone for that matter – I meet and heard people who do realize the importance of money in today’s economic system – and they do care about their fellow beings – but still they fail to realize that the current economic system is the flaw, and it is this same system which we have to change to CHANGE THE WORLD!

Fair Trade might have improved the life of some thousands of beings (tens of thousands?), but it is definitely not the way to stop the abuse of Life created by the current economic system.

Let’s change the root cause of this world’s problems – lets establish a monetary system which supports ALL of LIFE: EQUAL MONEY SYSTEM – a system that values ALL of LIFE.