kirisutogomen

I don't hate poor people. I don't think people mired in poverty need to struggle on unaided by the more fortunate. I'm not really sure how leftists can seriously believe that I or my ideological brethren don't care if people starve to death. Yes, if people are suffering, we should help them.

Helping them, however, is not the same as trying to help them. Neither is it the same as finding a scapegoat and demanding redress for imagined crimes. Current campaigns promoting so-called "Fair Trade" coffee are a lot more of the latter and not much of the helping people.

I understand that millions of coffee farmers are hurt by low coffee prices on world markets. What makes no sense is trying to blame me for it. Attempts to shame me into buying "Fair Trade" coffee are not going to help anyone; they are a silly waste of energy. Doing the things that would truly help impoverished farmers aren't nearly as exciting as making a big fuss about "exploitation," or trying to sell the idea that you're only ones who truly care.

If you've been to Starbucks recently you know that coffee prices are not any lower than they used to be. Well, actually, they are. Big truckloads of coffee beans are cheaper than they used to be. Almost none of the price of your grande cappuccino is actually for buying the beans, though.

These dramatically lower prices are making coffee-growing a lot less lucrative than it used to be. As a result, coffee farmers have less money. So, obviously, I'm screwing these guys by not paying them as much for their coffee as they were accustomed to receiving.

No, wait, I'm not screwing anybody. Prices didn't drop because I'm inconsiderate. Nor did they drop due to plunging demand. No, what happened was that international aid agencies convinced the Vietnamese to start growing lots of coffee. Also, farmers in Brazil and other big coffee exporters have improved their farming techniques. Now we can grow more coffee. This is the essence of progress that directly adds to the wealth of less-developed countries. This is not the essence of how to smack poor people around.

So what are we going to do about the obvious problem this creates, the poorer farmers? Well, we could do what the goofballs are doing, which is to select especially inefficient coffee farmers and pay them extra for their coffee. Hmm. Or we could say, hey, this is what always happens. When prices for one crop plummet, some farmers switch to more lucrative crops. Hey, do you suppose these guys could grow food? They're farmers. Should come pretty naturally.

One problem with this solution is that all the rich countries, ourselves included, have grotesque farm subsidies and other trade barriers which directly attack the agriculture for which poorer nations are so well-suited. It's not as glamorous to campaign against farm subsidies as it is to rail against yuppies with $3.00 cups of coffee, but it could do a hell of a lot more good for the millions stuck in abject poverty.

We used to be 90% farmers, and then we got really good at farming, and now we export a pile of food and almost none of us are farmers. The Brazilians are going to do the same thing. We could slow down the process, by artificially encouraging coffee farmers to keep growing coffee, instead of switching to soy or cotton or corn, or instead of retraining for non-agricultural work. Alternatively, we could let them quit growing coffee and engage in more proftable pursuits, in areas where we have greater need of their help.