Top Dog
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Fair tradeDo you buy things that are fair trade?
do you really care if it is fair trade?
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Chepfer
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I tend to buy what's cheapest but it must be good quality.
Aldi and liddle have recently been quoted by the Times as having better quality food than M&S but at a fraction of the price..... in fact some of the products were the same thing in different wrappers...
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Bear
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I have to say the issue never crosses my mind I buy what I want at the price I can afford up to the quality I can afford
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GTB
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I was listening to a programme on Radio 4 the other day which dealt in fair trade coffee. The producers of coffee are held over a barrel by the large producers and paid a pittance for their beans and are going out of business because they can't afford to carry on. The fair trade farmers on the other hand can afford to live and expand their business and employ greater numbers of people in their respective regions.
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Top Dog
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How do you feel about fair trade in this country ?
is it important that the farmers get a good deal on there produce?
would you be willing to pay more to quarentee that farmers in this country do get a fair deal?
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rosco
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I think important that producers everywhere get a fair deal - I did see a program about chocolate producers in the third world, who live at subsistence level and get paid a pittance for their produce, whereas it gets a tremendous markup and profits for all others involved in the production chain.
UK is indeed getting to be the same - don't think that the 'two-for-one' type offers you see are the supermarkets paying, often they blackmail producers into providing these at their own cost.
We should vote as consumers to stop this sort of thing by not always seeking to save a few pence on buying the cheapest item.
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GTB
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I have bought all my meat from my local farmshops for the past few years, thus cutting out the middle man - AKA the supermarkets. It doesn't take much to cut out the supermatkets in this country if you use local producers.
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Bear
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What would be the problem with farmers not dealing with the big supermarkets reducing the produce in them and therefore raising the price (Supply and Demand) and then selling direct to the public or am I being naive
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rosco
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| Bear wrote: | | What would be the problem with farmers not dealing with the big supermarkets reducing the produce in them and therefore raising the price (Supply and Demand) and then selling direct to the public or am I being naive |
No problem, and you're not naive: that's exactly the issue. The main reason for supermarkets is the economy of scale: they get a large number of people looking at produce and thus potentially able to buy them, whereas a single producer would have great difficulty in getting enough people exposed to their produce to sell direct.
Farmers markets are one solution, where individual farmers turn up at a market and try to attract a significant proportion of the population to buy, cutting out the middle man (supermarkets in this case).
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