Comércio justo é um movimento moderno em ricas nações atualmente
Vamos dar uma olhada se isso realmente ajuda
Indivíduos e trabalhadores nos países mais pobres
Frequentemente nós vemos comércio justo para café, e também para café em grãos.
O que comércio justo significa é que o consumidor, digamos nos Estados Unidos, paga
um alto preço pelo café, em troca, o café é certificado.
Isso é, é prometido que os trabalhadores que ajudaram a produzir o café receberam
mais ou tratados melhor ou trabalharam menos horas ou talvez
a produção foi ambientalmente mais amigável ou talvez
todas essas coisas juntas.
Consumers would seem to be happy, and
it also appears that the workers are better off.
So, who could possibly object to fair trade coffee?
Well, to take a deeper look at fair trade coffee, we need to consider
two prominent and very regular economics ideas.
The first is the notion of secondary consequences,
and the other is the distinction between the seen and the unseen.
Let's look at fair trade coffee from this point of view.
One potential problem with fair trade coffee or other forms
of fair trade is that it tends to shift demand to the wealthier nations and
the wealthier producers.
Go back to what fair trade means: it means there's a certification
that workers have been treated relatively well and
it means that there's certification that
the production process has met certain standards.
For that certification to be actually trustworthy,
usually it has to take place in a country which itself has a fair amount of trust,
some reasonable institutions, a relative minimum of corruption,
and actually a relatively high per capita income.
In other words, the decision to buy fair trade coffee is usually a decision
that you don't want to buy coffee from the very poorest nations in the world.
There's a lot of fair trade coffee coming out of Costa Rica,
and in Costa Rica the per capita income
in the course of a year on average is about $11,000, which isn't very high,
but it puts Costa Rica as one of the wealthier developing nations.
Another major coffee exporter is Ethiopia, and
Ethiopia is a much poorer nation than Costa Rica.
The per capita income in Ethiopia is about $800 a year.
And, of course, there isn't nearly as much fair trade coffee
in Ethiopia than in Costa Rica.
But which purchase does more to help the poor, the very poor?
Buying from Costa Rica or buying from Ethiopia?
Arguably, buying from Ethiopia.
Let's go back to this idea of the seen versus
the unseen consequences of an economic decision.
As a consumer buying fair trade coffee, perhaps you see the fact
that you're buying more coffee from Costa Rica, the fair trade coffee.
What is less visible is that now perhaps less coffee is being bought
from Ethiopia, and this will harm some workers in Ethiopia who now will earn
even less or will have fewer opportunities to produce coffee.
Another question is to ask:
"Who actually captures the gains from fair trade coffee?"
As we said upfront when you buy fair trade coffee,
the price of coffee is higher; so there is, in some manner,
extra money in the system.
But where does that extra money go?
Does it go to the coffee shop?
Does it go to a middle man?
Does it go to the poor individuals working in the fields in
some country abroad, be it Costa Rica, Ethiopia, Colombia, wherever it may be?
Where does that extra money go?
This gets us into some very complicated economics, and
a branch of economics known as tax incidence theory.
Let's just say there are some fairly natural or common scenarios
where the poor workers don't benefit at all.
One such scenario would be the demand for coffee goes up,
the demand for coffee laborers goes up. That in the short run raises
the wages of coffee workers, but then more individuals
try to become coffee workers and that pushes the wages back down.
Another possible scenario is simply that there's some kind of middle man
or marketing board or intermediary which deals with the coffee producers
in the poor country, and that intermediary makes sure that
those producers back in the poor country aren't really able
to demand a higher price for selling the coffee beans.
Very often when there is extra money in a chain of production,
the place where that extra money gets captured is the part of
the production chain that has some kind of market power or monopoly power
that has a trademark or a brand name that is seen by consumers
as somehow being different from the other competitors,
and who might that be?
Well, I have news for you, that's very often the coffee retailer.
So, it could be that the higher price you're paying for coffee,
ultimately the gains from that higher price are ending up
mostly in the pocket of the coffee retailer.
And, of course, it's no surprise that coffee retailers generally like and
promote the idea of fair trade coffee.
That's exactly what you might expect if indeed, a lot of the benefits were
going back to the coffee retailer and not the poor laborers.
In general, there is just not a lot of strong evidence that buying
fair trade coffee or other commodities has a significant positive impact
on living standards in poorer countries.
Instead of paying the higher price for fair trade coffee, you may simply
be doing yourself and indeed others a favor by just buying the coffee
you want at the lower price, taking that excess money, and
sending it to a very good charity.
To read more about fair trade, I would recommend these sources.