As this is a review of a book about the dangers of specious claims to objectivity, I should begin by observing that I am not only a Facebook friend of the author but we often bump into one another at NCF events and he and I met specifically to discuss Counterknowledge while the manuscript was still being written.
In other words, this is not so much a plain and useful assessment of the book as the characteristic log rolling of two toilers in the journalistic vineyard. If you want to know for sure whether it’s a good read or not, best wait for the reviews on Amazon.
With that caveat in mind, this book is exactly what you need... no, hang on, the cover already has puff quotes from Michael Gove and Nick Cohen; he doesn’t need one from me as well.
Let me attempt to be frank. Our newspapers, television schedules and bookshops are studded with horseshit: plausible sounding nonsense dressed up as sense. If it’s not homeopaths selling the world’s most expensive water, it’s the Da Vinci Code. If your outrage at this state of affairs has been dulled by overuse, then Counterknowledge can help to sharpen it once more. Damian Thompson doesn’t spare the vitriol as he derides the claims of Islamic creationists, the idea that the Chinese beat Columbus to the Americas, and Afrocentrist pseudohistorians who think Western civilisation was nicked off the back of an Egyptian lorry.
What is it that has driven us to neglect the factual for the seductive lie? Perhaps simply that we can. Truth is protected by its utility—its power to predict the world. “Counterknowledge” (I must admit to finding the term ugly and cumbersome, but equally acknowledge I can’t think of an adequate alternative) thrives when what we believe has no bearing on the success of our lives. Believing in Intelligent Design may stop you from forging a career as an evolutionary biologist, but were you really going to? For most of us our belief about the origin of species is essentially decorative. We can live with our delusions. But truth has a way of catching up with us. The Nazi and Soviet regimes were doomed by their commitment to counterknowledge, typified in each case by racial science and Lysenkoism. Once a gap has opened between the way the world actually is and your picture of it, it spreads like a crack in a sheet of glass. A movement that has convinced itself the moon really is made of green cheese is never going to manage a space program. A nation that has signed up for acupuncture courses is unwilling to give genetically-modified crops a fair hearing.
It is therefore a comfort to find Thompson announcing that the most serious case of counterknowledge seems to be occurring within Islamist circles. In the West after all, matters are still capable of correction. Everyone now knows that Gillian McKeith was no more a real doctor than I’m a stick of celery. And there are plenty of websites to take down bad books like 1421: The Year China Discovered America. Islamism, on the other hand, is sick with creationism, anti-semitic conspiracies, 9/11 denialism and all the florid paraphernalia of the cultic milieu—and lacks the means to cure itself.
Thompson quotes Pervez Hoodbhoy, professor of Physics at Qaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad, to the effect that no Muslim country has a viable educational system or a university of international stature. That is a tragic state of affairs, especially given the long-vanished flowering of science under the Abbasid caliphate. On the other hand, it is another sign proclaiming Islamism’s dead-end status.
Marc Sidwell, Research Fellow
Mark Richardson (not verified) | Mon, 2008-02-25 19:35
The Adam Smith institute has just published a report by Marc Sidwell entitled ‘Unfair Trade’ which has been picked up by a number of national papers in the UK without any real critical analysis. This report suggests that instead of guaranteeing them a better deal Fairtrade actually harms producers in developing countries.
The report is inaccurate and poorly researched, and its arguments are inconsistent.
A thoughtful sceptic’ should surely question the timing and motivation behind this report. To publish a controversial paper criticising Fairtrade by rehashing old arguments on the eve of Fairtrade Fortnight is surely more to do with raising the profile of the Adam Smith Institute than any real concern with whether Fairtrade is genuinely having a positive impact on the poor. The fact that all the major development agencies; Oxfam, Christian Aid, Action Aid, World Vision, CAFOD, WMDF, etc. who have a genuine concern for the world’s poor all support Fairtrade as part of the approach to tackling global poverty should certainly lead us to question the legitimacy of the reports claims very closely.
Below is a brief response to the main points as listed in the executive summary:
True, at present Fairtrade only helps a small number of farmers (around 3 million). However to suggest that these higher prices come at the expense of the great majority of farmers is absurd. Firstly, as Marc Sidwell points out several times in this report, Fairtrade is a tiny, tiny fraction of the world market, so even if it was to have a negative impact on non-Fairtrade prices the effect would be too small to notice.
But even if Fairtrade was to have 50% of the world market for a particular commodity there is no evidence to suggest this would have any negative impact on other farmers. In fact there is strong evidence to suggest that consumer pressure, partly brought about by being able to choose Fairtrade, has already encouraged non-Fairtrade companies to look at the ethics of their supply chain.
It’s also interesting to note that many critics of the abolition of slavery suggested that slaves would be worse off if slavery was abolished. No doubt some were, but I’m sure even the Adam Smith Institute would stop short of suggesting that the abolition of slavery was therefore a bad thing.
It doesn’t matter how developed a country, if farmers are living in poverty because they are not paid a fair price for their products then Fairtrade has a role to play. India is rapidly industrialising and far more ‘developed’ than Ethiopia, but there are still millions of people living on less than a dollar a day, many of them working to produce goods like cotton for a Western market.
Fairtrade cannot help every farmer at once, but that’s no reason not to start somewhere. That’s like saying that Children in Need is a bad thing because it helps some children but not others.
This is perhaps the most outrageous suggestion in the report. I’ve just returned from Ghana where I visited schools that were built with money earned through Fairtrade. Without Fairtrade these children would have no education and therefore no chance of a better life. With Fairtrade they might. I visited a women’s co-operative where the women had been given micro-loans from the Fairtrade premium with which to start businesses. In many cases this had doubled their family incomes, reducing the dependency on cocoa farming. Many Fairtrade farmers use the extra money they earn from Fairtrade to improve the efficiency and quality of their farms, and to diversify their income streams. Without Fairtrade most are trapped in poverty, unable to diversify as they lack the financial resources and know-how to invest in alternative crops or businesses.
Again this criticism is completely misplaced. Fairtrade criteria specifically address both family owned farms and ‘hired labour situations’
http://www.fairtrade.net/producer_standards.html
These criteria specify minimum wage, and minimum standards of health and safety. Non-Fairtrade certified farms and plantations have no such independent guarantee.
In some cases the percentage of produce from Fairtrade certified farms that has to be sold under non-Fairtrade prices is much higher than four-fifths. At Kuapa Kokoo, the Fairtrade cocoa co-operative in Ghana which supplies Divine Chocolate, only 3% of their cocoa is sold at Fairtrade prices. That’s because the global demand for Fairtrade is still so low. But that’s surely not a criticism of Fairtrade. It’s simply further reason to encourage more people to choose Fairtrade so that a larger percentage can be sold Fairtrade next year. If Kuapa Kokoo are able to build schools and wells with only 3% of their crop receiving a Fairtrade Social Premium, imagine the impact on the cocoa farmers and their communities if 100% was sold Fairtrade. What if Cadbury (who buy most of the rest) were to buy their cocoa offering a guaranteed minimum Fairtrade price, and extra money to the community?
As for non-Fairtrade products being passed off as Fairtrade, the certification and checking system is extremely rigorous. But with 3 million farms being certified it would be foolish to assume that there are no errors at all in the process. However non-Fairtrade certified products offer no guarantee at all that producers are paid a fair price or have minimum standards of health and safety. So the choice is not between a perfect system of global trade and an imperfect Fairtrade system, the choice is between a system that offers rigorous checking to try to ensure a better deal for third world producers, and an alternative which doesn’t even try.
It would appear that this statistic is simply made up. Firstly, it cannot possibly be true. And secondly, it completely misunderstands (or misrepresents) the Fairtrade system.
For many products consumers pay no more for Fairtrade certified products than non-Fairtrade products. For example all Sainsbury’s bananas are now Fairtrade and are offered at the same price as the non-Fairtrade bananas were. So even to suggest that all Fairtrade products come with a premium price paid by the consumer is wrong.
Some products are arguably more expensive than their non-Fairtrade counterparts. However this price difference is not a ‘Fairtrade premium’. There are many reasons for the different prices of products. For example small companies are unable to benefit from the economies of scale enjoyed by larger companies. Fairtrade does not guarantee that a percentage of the price paid by consumers goes to the producers. It guarantees that the producers have been paid a fair price for their products.
And of course retailers do take a large percentage of the retail price of a Fairtrade product. They take a large percentage of the price of all products they sell. The difference with Fairtrade is that it does guarantee that the producers were paid a fair price for the original commodity. Other products offer no such guarantee.
This part of the report is both lazy and hypocritical. It suggests that there are many other alternative schemes to Fairtrade which are ‘more effective’, and proceeds to list several without offering a critical analysis of any of them. Of the listed schemes that I’m aware of not one of them offers even half the development opportunities, protection for workers, protection for the environment and guaranteed income offered through Fairtrade.
Fairtrade certainly isn’t a perfect solution, and it’s important to recognise and address its weaknesses. But if the Adam Smith Institute is supposed to be offering an independent and objective assessment then it needs to subject the alternative schemes it suggests to equally ‘rigorous’ scrutiny.
This report quite wrongly suggests that Fairtrade is the opposite of Free Trade. In fact Fairtrade operates within a free market economy. It gives information to consumers about the conditions and prices in the supply chain and offers consumers the option of choosing products that guarantee a better deal to third world producers. And what is evident is that an increasing number of consumers are making that choice.
Whether or not abolishing all tariffs and subsidies would benefit or harm poor farmers in developing countries is a completely different argument. It has nothing whatsoever to do with whether Fairtrade is benefiting farmers or not.
Conclusion
It’s important for Fairtrade to be challenged on its ethical credentials, and measured against ethical alternatives. But the arguments put forward by Marc Sidwell for the Adam Smith Institute are poorly researched, poorly argued and in many cases plain false. If these criticisms are the harshest that can be levelled at it then Fairtrade is doing a fine job of helping millions of farmers and their communities trade their way out of poverty.
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