[Astrocat]

***** apparently, i talk too much ! (O.O) the forum has made me post this response in two parts ! *****

Poverty is relative.
[...]
Apparently large numbers of people in Britain live in poverty, but it is a gross lie. They measure poverty simply by looking at the 'wealth gap' and saying anyone who earns under a certain percentage of the average wage is in poverty. It is the politics of envy used for propaganda.

Yes, that is correct. But, I am not the UK government, and unlike them i stick to a much more meaningful definition of 'poverty' when talking about it, rather than some inappropriate political pseudo-meaning.
This is also the case for organisations such as Christian Aid or Action-Aid.

That definition would be "A state in which a family’s income is too low to be able to buy the quantities of food, shelter and clothing that are deemed necessary."

or

"A situation in which a person or household lacks the resources necessary to be able to consume a certain minimum basket of goods. The basket consists either of food, clothing, housing and other essentials (moderate poverty) or of food alone (extreme poverty)"

If people can't afford housing and live in mud huts, and can't afford enough food to stay alive.... then surely only a very dishonest, callous, or very misguided person (or simply someone using the political version of the term), would then try to claim that this situation can be viewed as 'not being in poverty' according to their own personal interpretation of the term.

Who sets the minimum wage? And would it vary from country to country, region to region? 50p an hour is going to mean a very different thing in different countries. It could massively destabilise whol economies. Imagine for example if a supermarket supplier suddenly started offering jobs at three times the local average wage. Those people would suddenly have a lot more money to spend, which would cause high localised inflation. That in turn would mean that everyone else would then be unable to afford the local goods and their standard of living would drop. Would you then hold the supermarket responsible for that too?

Hence my point - you can't just muck about with other people's economies.

I'm not sure why you were making that point, though.

Fair trade organisations are campaigning for governments to be allowed enough political power to be able to have a real say in the control of their own economies. And are also campaigning for those governments to then, when they are powerful enough to be able to, establish and enforce a fair minimum wage requirement.

Your point in no way contradicts the aims and goals of the fair trade movement, nor what i was saying.

Because if employees have only limited rights it means that employers aren't afraid to hire them because it isn't hard to fire them when they aren't needed (unlike in Germany and France). It is bad for individuals, but good for economies.

When growers and suppliers are cut off by supermarkets, almost without exception they are left with thousands of acres of then worthless crops, masses of debt, and a business which wasn;t really sustainable even when it had a client then has to somehow be sustainable with no client.

People in that situation are in no way going to find it easier to get another source of employment, than people in a similar situation who have not been asked to give the supermarket chain bribes (so who are less heavily in debt), who have not been asked to grow and supply thousands of acres of crops then been screwed over at the last minute by the supermarkets, and whose business was sustainable when they had a client and might continue to be if they find another client fairly rapidly.

I am not saying that it is OK, I am saying that it is just how it is and there is nothing that we can do about it.

People say the same to me about animal rights activism.
Fortunately for me, they're wrong as well.

I am taking your points on board, but generally believe that it is not my place to tell people in other countries how to live their lives, what jobs they should have or not, what wages they should recieve, what political systems they should have and so on. The days of the British Empire telling other countries how to run their affairs are long over and they won't thank us for it.

As i mentioned before, this isn't an issue for me because i don't define things in terms of "us" and "them" . Ultimately, my nationality is a complete irrelevance.

If it would be okay for me to criticise the UK government as a british citizen wherever appropriate and relevant, then why would it be any less valid for me to recognise the same things and hold the same views about the behaviour, if i were an American person ?

And if it would be appropriate for African citizens to lobby their government for fairer trade..... then why should it be different for me, purely based on my race ?