The problem with Fair Trade bananas is that bananas are too cheap – there’s just not enough cash in the pipeline to make this strategy for bringing true “fairness” to the fruit effective (Fair Trade bananas cost, at most, just a few pennies more than conventional fruit; compare that to coffee and chocolate – two relative Fair Trade success stores – which garner huge premiums for their provenance.) Farmers in Dominica are finding that out, as this story, from Dominica News Online, reports, quoting Mitchell Roberts, of the country’s National Fair Trade Organisation.
“The costs of inputs escalated, the cost of packaging material escalated, labour has always been a high cost, and because of that farmers feel that they were not making money and their cost of production is high and the returns they get, was not reflective of the amount of effort they put, so some farmers definitely had to leave it,” Roberts stated. He said there are now three hundred and fifty active Fairtrade farmers selling bananas, a major decrease over the last year. “We started with close to six hundred farmers when we started last year, and now, we are down to three hundred and fifty,” he said.
There’s far more at stake in Fair Trade bananas than in any other food product. Nothing else comes close to the banana’s century of injustice – and nothing any Fair Trade banana marketed today comes close to reversing those injustices in a statistically significant manner. If the point of Fair Trade isn’t just to make consumers feel good, then those who currently advocate Fair Trade need to look at ways to sell bananas for more money. Hint: If you sell the same banana variety as Chiquita and Dole, you’re in bed with them. Starting in September, I’ll be publishing a series of articles explaining why; if you’re in Los Angeles, you can come see my talk at LACE, which will cover the same topic.
Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman 
