[Astrocat]

It is patronising imperialism to suggest that we know best and other countries can't manage their own laws.

If people examine behaviour on it's own merits rather than through the lens of 'our' and 'their' behaviour, then that's no longer the case.

Bear in mind that I am advocating campaigning against UK supermarkets. I am a UK citizen, so I'm not sure where your comparison to patronising racism comes from.

It also seems to be clear to me that many countries' authorities do indeed choose not to enforce human rights protection of various kinds, in many cases.l

The problem with the Fair Trade system is that it immediately segregates the food, rather than building it into the mainstream system.
Ideally the supermarkets would bring it in wholesale into their premium ranges.

That isn;t a problem with Fair Trade or the system behind it.
It's simply a matter of lack of support for it resulting in it being a minority option, rather than the majority one.

For as long as people view it as a bad thing to give people a decent wage, and prioritise saving a few pence, things are unlikely to change in the way which you describe.

I'm not sure how you expect fair trade to become any more inside the mainstream system than it presently is, given the low demand for it..... supermarkets sell whole ranges of fairly traded goods, and Sainsbury's even announced that all of it's own bananas would be fairly traded (which they now are, which i congratulated them on)

For example, one might expect the Sainsbury's Taste The Difference range to use better quality ingredients sourced from more 'ethical' companies. They already use free range eggs across the line, so this isn't unachievable.

I wouldn't assume that there was any ethical improvement there, although i would imagine that better quality produce would be used, in order to produce a better flavour.
None of the Taste the Difference range uses any fairly traded ingredients, so unfortunately I'm not sure what point you are making there.

There is also the obvious point that the companies that sell the produce only get the business because they keep their costs right down; hence the wages have to match. If they upped the wages, another company elsewhere would potentially get the business instead.

Supermarkets squeeze sellers, who pressure field workers in turn.
But you seem to be saying that there is nothing wrong with supermarkets doing that, since you reckon that's ok because they are doing it in order to make money.

A supermarket chain could easily raise their wages.

For example, Sainsbury's are seemingly not going out of business because of their banana decision.

The people who are the middlemen between growers and supermarkets often get business from growers because they lock people into situations where they have no other option.

What you are saying gives me the impression that you have not read the reports which i posted. Is that the case, or do you simply disagree with their contents ?

You reckon that buying fairly traded goods is a form of subsidy, but that seems to contradict the meaning of 'subsidy'

A subsidy is, by definition, "a grant paid by a government to an enterprise that benefits the public" ...

As is no doubt clear, consumers paying a price for something which enables the manufacturer to stay in business .... is something which has happened since the dawn of time, and is not necessarily anything to do with subsidisation.

For comparison, all flesh , eggs and milk produced in the UK (and many other countries) is heavily subsidised through 3-pronged subsidisation.
The government uses a lot of tax money to pay for crops for farmed animals to eat, the government pays money to reduce the product cost for consumers, then they give handouts to help with pollution cleanup, and as a bonus they also dole out subsidies to cover things like foot & mouth outbreaks, and so forth.

The only technicality is that there is no evidence that doing that truly benefits the general public. It's still considered to be subsidisation , though.

For comparison, if there were 'fairly traded eggs' which were ten times the price of 'normal eggs' because the farmers are in a country where they receive no subsidy, and they have to charge that much to stay in business and keep their families from dying of hunger...... and if people chose to buy those full-price eggs, then they are simply choosing to pay for what they buy.
They subsidise nothing in doing so, and nobody necessarily would subsisdise their purchase.

If you interfere in the free market too much, it starts to build levels of inefficiency into the system.

If you ask supermarkets about the ethics of their supply chain, they usually (always so far, for me) feign confusion and lack of knowledge, insisting that their chain of supply is involving and complex, and it will take a long time to figure out what's going on in it but they might get back to me eventually.

To my mind, that is the sort of thing which breeds inefficiency in the world of trade.... not fair trade support or activism.

As far as I am aware, there is no evidence that the fair trade foundation are inefficient, or that their efforts cause inefficiency of any kind.

The more rights you give people, the less likely they are to keep their job.

Then, if that is the case, and if the converse were true (that the more you deprive people of rights, the more likely they are to keep their jobs) then why are so many impoverished produce growers and suppliers going bust left, right and centre as a direct result of supermarket market tactics ?

This is why France and Germany have such high rates of unemployment; their socialist style employment system means that employers try to employ as few people as possible.

It sounds to me as if that has much more to do with capitalism than socialism.
The companies are tight-fisted, so they try to save money by employing as few people as possible.
It is a business 'tactic' which is repeated millions of times globally, in all kinds of companies, under all kinds of governments.

Pre-globalisation, many of these low paid workers wouldn't have had any work at all, or it would have been even worse.

Why do you think so ?

Supermarkets are just businesses who will sell what people want.

This is a common misconception, but supermarkets know how much power they have, and milk it.

This is why the only kind of lettuce you will often see in supermarkets is the bogus iceberg lettuce, why Morrisons gets away with selling wooden carrots and cardboard spring onions, why the only varieties of apple which are ever available are ghastly nasty things like the misnomered 'golden delicious' strain, and so forth... this is not because the consumers have a special love for dire apples, inedible salads and unstorable lettuce..... it is because that is what the supermarkets choose to sell. They know that people can not simply choose to not buy groceries, and they not uncommonly make efforts to put any and all local competition out of business.

It is well documented that in many areas, local business has been devastated by big supermarket chain/s and many people have no option but to get all of their groceries from one chain (to reach another chain they might have to go out of town at enormous expense which they can not necessarily even afford)

Until that attitude is changed, or people start buying the Fair Trade goods in sufficiently large numbers then it will never change.

If people are prepared to pay 80p say, for bananas......

Then supermarkets can make a lot of profit by selling bananas for that price, which are fairly traded.

The point i made in my first post, is that fairly traded produce is not typically prohibitively expensive through necessity, but usually through supermarkets' greed.

Supermarkets are not going out of business with begging cups outstretched :P unlike many of the unfortunate people who are messed about with by their 'purchasing process'