Fair Trade Products

Fair Trade products are products that are brought directly from producers in low income countries by the U.S to help stimulate their economies, by cutting out international trade. To be deemed Fair Trade the producers themselves have to make sure working conditions are well and healthy and must be paying their employees sufficient wages. By using this Fair Trade system the U.S is suppose to be creating more jobs by securing and increasing demand for these imported products directly from the producers. Some of these Fair Trade products include coffee, wine, bananas, tea, fresh fruit, cocoa, and vanilla beans. This system was created to keep producers from paying their workers extremely low wages and to keep them from pocketing too much of their profit. This plan, in fact, has succeeded in its efforts. It has raised wages for some sellers and some workers in low-wage countries. Some economists worry about the effects on a broader economic scale. Some of the main concerns are that the views of fairness by these Fair Trade advocates seem to be highly subjective and not economically realistic.  Some even argue that it may hold some of these producers back, seeing that they already are making a good profit off of these higher prices products, from expanding their operations to more efficient ways of production, whether it has to deal with employment, new technology or whatever.

In my opinion the Fair Trade system is a good one that will help countries that are poorer than us. But there is always the side that has to think about the issues within our own country and whether we should devote more to helping ourselves before we always try to go out of our way the help others.