Thinking of how to engage all you blog fans I found myself gazing at my home grown tomato plants. I’ve grown them from seed and I have been so thrilled that they’ve grown so well and are beginning to show signs of flowering and producing tomatoes!! There have been some casualties along the way but those that are there seem all the stronger.
Looking at my first dabble in the world of ‘growing your own’ I was reminded of a conversation I had the other night with a local food co-operative about the merits and differences of local food and fairtrade food. This seems to be a recurring conversation and I am interested to hear what others think about the debate?
I personally go with the view that many products which are fairtrade aren’t locally available in the UK (I’m certainly not sure the weather is getting warm enough for us to meet our national demand for bananas) therefore I support fairtrade immediately on that count. Where I meet a ‘dilemma’ of whether or not to buy local or fairtrade, for example with apples, I go with seasonality. If they are in season locally I buy them, if not I seek fairtrade varieties.
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Click here to learn how you can invest in fair trade. Click here to donate to the Shared Interest Foundation |
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I think you’ve got a good system going. I mainly look for fairtrade for coffee, tea and chocolate. I never thought of fruits, like apples, needing a fair trade designation. Obviously there’s a hole in my education. I hate when that happens!
One point I think is interesting to consider with regards to Fair Trade goods is how the underlying assumptions could change with the changes we’ve seen in past years in terms of food prices. The point of Fair Trade was that farmers are at the bottom of price totem pole (the whole terms of trade argument mentioned in the paper you guys posted) – if food prices start rising again as they did in 2007-08, farmers will be better off, much like when they receive Fair Trade prices. Urban poor, on the other hand, who face market prices for their food, will be worse off. At that point, Fair Trade prices will still be good for farmers, but will hurt the urban poor by pushing up market prices – is there an equilibrium at which one offsets the other? Something I’ve written a little about,
http://jointstock.wordpress.com/2009/05/27/public-health-vs-food-securit/