Tag: fair trade
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“Is Fair Trade Fair?” – Primer on Free Trade Coffee
What are the economic merits of Free Trade Coffee? In this video, my friend Victor Claar (professor of economics at Henderson State University) gives a 25 minute presentation about the economics of fair trade. It was originally presented at the Macmillan's EconEd Conference last year. The audience is economics teachers, but the presentation is accessible…
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Forget “Fair Trade”: A Supply Chain Overhaul To Boost Coffee Farmers’ Income 400%
Forbes: A Supply Chain Overhaul To Boost Coffee Farmers' Income 400% This is about a social enterprise on a mission to reinvent the coffee supply chain, giving farmers a bigger and more equitable piece of the action. Aimed at growers producing specialty-grade, premium, Fair Trade certified coffee, Vega hopes to enable farmers to roast and…
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“Buying ‘Fair trade’ coffee is not really helping the very poor”
Economist: Not so fair trade BUYING ‘Fairtrade’ coffee is not really helping the very poor, new research suggests. By comparing living standards in Fairtrade-certified producing areas in Ethiopia and Uganda with similar non-Fairtrade regions, four development economists from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London found that Fair Trade agricultural workers often…
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Economist Collen Haight on “Combating Global Poverty with a Cup of Coffee.”
Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (a.k.a. Pope Benedict XVI) famously said, "A morality that believes itself able to dispense with the technical knowledge of economic laws is not morality but moralism." This certainly is true of Fair Trade coffee. Here is a clip by San Jose State University economist Colleen Haight on "Combating Global Poverty with a…
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Is Fair Trade Coffee Curing Poverty?
Acton Institute PowerBlog: Is Fair Trade Coffee Curing Poverty? Sarah Stanley does a great job summarizing Victor Claar's take on Fair Trade Coffee: “Who could be against fairness?” Victor Claar asked this question at Acton University last month. He and Travis Hester gave a talk titled, “Fair Trade Versus Free Trade” with their focus on…
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Unfair Trade
Foreign Affairs: Unfair Trade The Fair-Trade Movement Does More Harm Than Good … Until now, any questioning of the fair-trade movement has been limited to the micro level. The movement has faced repeated criticisms, for example, for the relatively expensive fees that producers must pay to get a fair-trade label, which make it ineffective for…
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Prosperity: The Trade Policy Instrument
The final instrument for addressing the problems of the poorest nations, given in Paul Collier’s The Bottom Billion, is trade policy. Collier acknowledges the complex ramifications of trade. He laments the good-intentioned but wrongheaded campaigns of many activist and Christian organizations who cast freer trade as a conspiracy of large corporations to take advantage of…