Is fair trade really fair?

I recently met a person from Tanzania, East Africa. We got chatting and I found out that he is a coffee bean farmer right near Mt. Kilimanjaro. I asked him about how the fair trade thing is going. And he didn't look too happy.

Here's what he had to say.

"The fair trade buys my beans at $1.50 per pound, sadly they are being sold at £12 per pound. Is that fair trade?

The point of fair trade was exactly that, a fair trade. While I understand there are costs associated with shipping, storage, wages and so on, I don't believe it costs 8 times as much to sell my beans to customers at Starbucks.

The price of coffee has gone down dramatically over the last 20 years which means we are making less money than we did then. Admittedly the fair trade are paying us $0.25 more for our coffee over non-fair trade prices in our market. Globalisation and world wide economics have caused this. The misleading thing is that you buy your fair trade coffee and you think you're doing the right thing when there is really nothing fair about it. What is fair is that you pay less for your coffee or we get paid more for ours."

He raised a valid point. But I can't help but think that maybe it does cost a lot to package, ship, staff and sell these beans or any other products you find in fair trade-centric shops. Resources like this cost a lot and the amount of money you need to throw at it to get the products to the consumer can accumulate to a large amount of money.

This is something to think about. I have some friends who promote fair trade, they buy it and they push the propaganda to others. Sadly, this coffee producer I met tells me that the story isn't all that rosy.

Here's where I have to voice my own opinion about fair trade. I have always had a suspicion that fair trade might have or have not been fair, but the true definite feeling I had was that someone somewhere was making a bit of money on the side. With prices 8 times what you pay, the profit margin seems quite high. If I were to sell computer items at that percentage, I'd be broke. No one would pay $8000 for a laptop when the same model is at another shop for $1000.

To me, the saddest part is now knowing what the otherside is like. It's not so much the truth, it's that the truth is true.