A disturbing thought

There is now a huge market for 'fairtrade' goods, that is, products, generally in the tea/coffee/chocolate traditional cash crop line, where the producers are paid a fair wage.

A nasty little thought on this; does it really pay the companies who produce things to produce them under dubious conditions in unstable countries with prehistoric agricultural methods, with prices fluctuating greatly due to local disturbances? Would they not be better off build up efficient communities around growing them, as used to be done with, say, iron-working? Maybe the whole fair-trade thing is, well, market segmentation.

Over-paranoid? Very probably, but a horrible idea, eh? I'd say it's far more likely that there's something nasty going on with the 'guaranteed non-blood diamonds' crowd, actually; blood diamonds are those from conflict zones and/or produced by forced or extremely exploitative labour. The people who certify their diamonds as not blood diamonds clearly have a vested interest in keeping a large part of the rest of the market bloody.

Also, why do we only ever hear about fairtrade coffee and similar? Other industries can be exploitative too, you know! The whole apple production thing in the US is very dubious, for example, and receives a lot of coverage from Human Rights Watch; Human Rights Watch was a group originally set up to monitor the filthy commies, but has now extended its mandate to peer over the shoulders of western-friendly dictatorships, and even, recently, the US itself. They have somehow twisted the concept of 'human rights' (originally, it seems, meaning having a leader who was in with a bad crowd) into encompassing ridiculous things like healthcare and a living wage. Filthy commies!

Anyway, the apples; US labour law is a bit strange about seasonal labourers such as apple-pickers, and indeed about agriculture in general. A lot of the normal rules don't apply. US labour law always struck me as very much legislation by the C++ standardisation model, actually; by the time it was put together, lots of people were already doing naughty things which ended up being grandfathered in. What, precisely, the consequences of regulating the apple industry would have been I don't know, but it certainly seems that the US avoided doing it.

Ramble, ramble, ramble; that's me.