Can Fair Trade Really Be Fair

Can fair trade really be fair?
Admittedly, fair trade has several shortcomings. Firstly, fair trade makes farmers become over-dependent social groups. In fact, farmers are not learning the real skills for them to survive, in contrast, they are becoming depend on fair trade organizations to gain limited income. However, under such circumstance, farmers are fragile to suffering from financial crisis because of their negative position. According to Jeffery(2012), farmers are just receiving another form of subsidy from fair trade organizations and they rely on those help more than before. Therefore, for majority of impoverished people, even establishing their own small business is a difficult task for them to realize, for they lack of affluent
Majority of goods in fair trade are agricultural products and handicrafts, such as coffee, bananas and sugar. To some extent, this scale is too small to cater to demands of market and to reduce poverty effectively. After all, the number of impoverished people in this world is tremendous and they can form to be relatively strong fair trade organization participants, it might a huge task to tackle the demanding problem with small scale of fair trade. Thirdly, management system in fair trade can hinder the profits of income to producers. In the whole process of fair trade, there are three major members in the transaction, producers, retailers and consumers. This means that whether the excessive payment from consumers are used to pay for certification of fairtrade organization or for producers is a question. In this case, fair trade may not be real fair for consumers and producers because of those hidden aspects. For consumers, there is a possibility that even expensive costs they have paid, the quality of products are still unreliable. For poor producers, final selling price of those commodities might be several times higher than their incomes. Therefore, whole fair trading process is still not tangible enough to
Initially, the aim of fair trade was to give subsidy to the poor, however, it is a business now. For consumers, they can buy safe and delicate goods while they are helping poor countries through their purchasing of fair trade goods. Nowadays, more consumers are curious about native places of products and even the producers (Tuppen, 2013). Therefore, fair trade provided a suitable chance for consumers to express their inner thoughts and decide which products they should buy. In 2011, a 19% increase on sales, which proved the popularity of fair trade products (Tuppen,