WeBuiltThisBuffetOnSausageRoll ·
09/03/2020 22:12
I help organise a regular all-age community group, funded by donations/contributions, during which drinks and biscuits are made available for people to help themselves. We're all passionate about fair trade (and it goes hand-in-hand with the ethos of the group) and the person who buys the coffee and tea etc puts in regular orders on behalf of the group with a very large well-known fair-trade supplier.
However, I'm starting to wonder if they are genuinely significantly better for their producers than all of the other options, considering that their prices are a lot higher than the supermarket own-brands, many of which state prominently that they are made with certified FT ingredients.
I really don't know the answer to this, so I'd appreciate any info that people have: does buying FT coffee from a 'specialist' FT supplier actually benefit the producers in developing countries any more than buying FT-certified coffee from Asda - and, if so, by what margins?
Our primary concern is to ensure that the producers receive very fair pay for their hard work, but I still have a niggling wonder if it could all just be a bit of a gimmick - i.e. if the specialist firms trumpet their 'headline' credentials and charge a big premium for them, but also benefit handsomely themselves from passing on a fair price; whilst the standard shops might just do basically the same without a fanfare, in great volume, and make a much smaller margin per unit for themselves. If the farmers and producers would see no difference in their earnings anyway, are we just effectively throwing away funds that could be better allocated to other resources and activities?
Does anybody know? Have other people wondered this and, if so, what conclusions have you come to?
I haven't enabled voting, as I fear that it could be rendered meaningless by certain people scanning the title, telling me to 'check my privilege' and voting YABU without actually reading the OP 