Bozi said:
you know that the whole process ahs gone arse to elbow when mcdonalds and starbucks get involved

but whatever makes these stiff-collared,middle-class,eco-conscious blowhards feel better about themselves and able to sneer at us.
It's been a long strange trip. I've been aware of the whole Fair Trade thing for a number of years. Ironically, it was developed as sort of a response to the big business practices of the likes of Nestlé, Sara Lee, Proctor & Gamble, and Kraft Foods -- where they helped the Vietnamese grow and flood the market with C-grade robusta beans at $0.40/pound, putting any quality grower almost out of business with an inability to recoup costs. Fair Trade was also a response to the big retailers like McDonald's and Starbucks who encouraged those cutthroat price practices with mass quantity, questionable-grade beans.
To that extent, Fair Trade has been a success story in that now McDonald's and Starbucks -- two examples that were the whole cause for Fair Trade -- flipped sides and now support the causes. But Fair Trade has really gotten out of hand, IMO, particularly in the past year when all the "stiff-collared,middle-class,eco-conscious blowhards" suddenly got a hold of it and started to demonize anybody who produced or drank coffee that didn't carry the Fair Trade label.
Fair Trade is a completely flawed attempt at a problem. Some argue that it's better than nothing at all, while others disagree. What it's created is a Fair Trade cartel of sorts that works for some farms in a select few countries. But it's punished other farmers and created a lot of abuses too. It's gotten so bad that one of the premiere, high-end roasters in the U.S., Chicago's Intelligentsia, recently discontinued doing any business with Fair Trade. (THey created their own
"Direct Trade" labelling in response to how shady Fair Trade has become.)
So what we have now are all these eco-conscious blowhards that are a couple of years behind of where they should be, promoting something now they should have been a couple years ago, but by now they should be questioning its value and recognizing all its flaws ... for which they are blindly not doing at all yet.