Fairtrade Conceived as a Species of Charity?

What is Fairtrade?

Y'know, if I were a smart young West African and given our region produces the raw material for half the world's chocolate I'd make it my life's goal to destroy Cadbury's, Hershey's and all the rest of them plucking up our cocoa beans on the cheap ...... I'd have a "No Bean leaves the Country unless its in a Chocolate bar" campaign.

At the turn of the century in Ireland, D.P. Moran and Arthur Griffith argued English manufacturers were strangling Irish growth as cash-strapped Irish consumers bought cheaper imported foreign goods while indigenous nascent industries were strangled in the crib as cottage home-spuns couldn't compete; likewise little incentive was provided by Westminster to alter the status quo. And why should they? Many of the British Liberal and Conservatives owned the very English manufacturing interests which would be threatened were they to do so. Land was our greatest resource but post-famine consolidation favoured ranching to satisfy a foreign export market - "Ireland had fulfilled her destiny and become an English pasture and sheep walk" as Marx caustically observed.

Our hands were tied and as a result small farms haemorrhaged all but the first born; the post-famine exodus from the land till the Great War tripling that of "An t-ochras" with 20 million Americans claiming 1st/2nd generation Irish descent by 1900. Bled from the land of their birth just like today in West Africa where doctors per head of population is 100 times less than the European average facilitating an Ebola outbreak which no-one gave a flying proverbial about until it threatens to land on our own doorstep.

Sweet, sugar-coated irony indeed; by with-drawing supports for indigenous enterprise, by crushing a domestic tertiary sector centred on the un-tapped resource of cocoa processing, denying funding for dedicated University departments, the IMF/World Bank system of "structural adjustment" - raw material export in short - crushes, for the benefit of Western corporates and our own engorged portfolios any chance that that young West African hopeful has of carving out a life for himself in the land of his birth & when he comes over here confabulating tales of political oppression, as the Geneva Convention makes no allowance for "economic war crimes" which our Refugee Commissioners dutifully background to exchequer exhaustion, we give him 20 euro a week & stuff him in a hostel for eight years. Corporate/bureaucratic vampires need only give them back their country, and peeps - buy the fair feckin trade chocolate bar. Not a lot to ask.

President Higgins criticises Direct Provision - RTÉ News

Under EU law and the Geneva Convention asylum seekers are "our own" and its farcical that some families have had to wait for up to ten years to have their applications processed while living on the 19 euro pittance - I know several families in this position and its soul-destroying for them; particularly the men, who often come from cultures where it is an abomination for them to sit about idly. Leaving aside the humanitarian dimension, it doesn't even make sense to keep them in limbo from a narrow "penny-pinching" economic perspective as the vast bulk of them are itching to get working and will take any employment offered once given the opportunity; they simply want to get on with their lives.

Some refuges/asylum seekers here are even working voluntarily in charity shops and actually helping to raise money for the Irish homeless along with other worthy causes .. more initiatives of this nature, encouraging rapid integration and language acquisition via voluntary placements would be progressive I think; even manning evening soup kitchens for our own homeless.

Most asylum seekers are smart, get up and go types with proven initiative (getting out of war zones and sundry hell-hole situations takes a bit of savvy) and represent an untapped resource under our very noses - extend them a bit of responsibility and they will be an undoubted asset to this country in the years ahead; do the opposite, let their communities rot and disintegrate and we'll wind up like France and England with an alienated, ghettoised sub-culture & the rise of an unbearable quasi-fascist far right led by Kevin Myers et al. squawking "Ireland for the Irish".

On the wider front, I reckon the battle was lost when they wound down UNCTAD and turfed out the dependency theorists in the mid to late 70's. Once the Prebisch-Singer school lost its forum and the WTO came into existence in tandem with Reaganomics and Thatcherite "TINA", corporates got to under-write trade rules and dismantle those protective barriers behind which grass-roots led, resource-based, indigenous tertiary industries could develop - "kicking away the ladder" as Chang would have it.

Ricardo's "Comparative advantage" had long upheld a veneer of respectability for 19th C. exploitative imperial economics marching under the banner of "Free Trade" but with the collapse of the socialist Non-Aligned Movement it has now become an accepted truism within the entire discourse concerning "development", shrunk (and conceived in the popular domain at least), as a SPECIES OF CHARITY - thus the perception that everything revolves around "fund solicitation". Privately funded or NGO/bilateral partnerships for micro-projects (bore-holes, farm inputs, medical centres etc.) are in the short-term commendable but a drop in the ocean and actually counter-productive when you think of the greater needs for (drum-roll cliché) "long-term sustainable & equitable development".

Africa needs to industrialize on its own terms, like South Korea did - not be force-fed SAP programmes (or their thinly veiled derivatives) which merely reproduce the same skewered patterns of structural dependence. Generally speaking, IMF/WB led development actually encourages the creation of corrupt elites who monopolise licensing contracts and oversee resource extraction while the "debt model" ensures dependency on balance of payments support. We'd all like to see a broader, multi-disciplinary approach to conceiving development but for myself much of the diversity that is there is still constrained within the straightjacket of the Western-led neoliberal model.