A bitter pill to swallow

Guardian Unlimited (UK)

Is fair trade a well-meaning dead end that is worsening the crisis for coffee growers? Oliver Balch weighs up the evidence

For students in the mid-1990s, fair trade coffee was about as close as many of us got to the taste of revolution. Not university politics at its most radical perhaps, but the stuff was sufficiently disgusting and expensive to make it feel as if we were making common cause with the world's impoverished coffee farmers.
A new paper from the Adam Smith Institute dismisses our caffeine-led activism as a "well-meaning dead end." And that is the best case scenario. At worst, the "economic illiteracy" of fair trade advocates could end up making the situation worse, the free market thinktank argues.

It is difficult to imagine how a system that guarantees small producers a fair wage for their crop could make the situation in the crisis-ridden coffee industry any worse.

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