James5

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Was doing the grocery shopping in Ringwood Safeway today and saw Green & Blacks chocolate for only $3.99 a block! They’ve got Milk, Maya Gold (their FT labelled one) and Dark. They’ll be in the chocolate aisle.

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FUD from the right in this article in the Australian. Tim Wilson, from the Institute of Public Affairs, and Sinclair Davidson, an economics professor from RMIT, have actually asked the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission to look into Oxfam. They reckon Oxfam is guilty of “misleading or deceptive conduct” due to their claims that fairtrade helps to lift coffee farmers out of poverty. Tim and Sinclair say producers are been unfairly charged thousands of dollars to become certified and that some labourers are being paid “below minimum wage”.

Where to begin with this rubbish? Obviously they are just trying to make a big scene by complaining to the ACCC, but why are they wasting Oxfam’s time with this? Yes it does cost money to become a certified farmer - this pays for people to perform inspections and make sure everything is fair - but in my (limited) encounters with coffee/cocoa farmers this hasn’t even been brought up as an issue. To say the labourers are being paid “below minimum wage” means almost nothing compared with the situation of non-certified farms - fairtrade at least guarantees labour rights and other minimum standards. It’s definitely not a dream job being a coffee farmer, but at least fairtrade makes things a little bit better.

Their main argument is that based on their neo-liberal assumptions free trade is the only ’sustainable’ answer to the coffee crisis, ignoring the very real positive impacts fairtrade products have had around the world. “Sustainable” free trade means poor farmers remain poor and rich corporations get richer. Fairtrade is a carefully thought out system of providing a fair price and minimum guarantees for produce. Just like in Australia we have minimum wages and other workplace conditions, fairtrade takes this to an international level. The Australian economy seems to be doing pretty well even without 100% “free”, unrestrained employment agreements, fairtrade takes relies on these same equitable principles and seems to be doing pretty well.

This sort of rubbish makes me angry, their ideology seems to have overridden their common sense. Hopefully it won’t muddy the waters with all the good media attention fairtrade has received for Fairtrade Fortnight.

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Fantastic news! Fairtrade easter eggs are available right now at a whole heap of Target, Target Country and Coles stores. For a full list check out the FTAANZ website, they’ve got a couple of PDFs up. I’ve heard they cost about $6 each and are pretty decently sized, so not too expensive. They are made by Scarborough Fair and are availabe in both dark and milk choc. The packaging looks sweet and is also educational. I’m buying one today, but won’t be able to comment on taste til after Easter. Go buy heaps of them - it’ll encourage Coles/Target to keep selling fairtrade goodies after Easter hopefully.

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Just came across these Machimna movies about Fairtrade. They are a bit cheesy and the World of Warcraft one may requires some understanding of the actual game, but it’s good to see Fairtrade branching out to more mainstream groups like gamers.

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Took a stroll down the Coles in Croydon confectionary aisle today and was pleasantly surprised. Green & Blacks chocolate was for sale! They had the little bars in both dark and milk chocolate for $2.70.

And the Maya Gold fairtrade chocolate for $5.99. They also did have dark chocolate in the bigger blocks, but were sold out.

Right near by they also had “Whittakers Dark Ghana” chocolate - which is almost like advertising your oppressive credentials (though Whittakers have have shown interest in fairtrade there’s nothing certain there yet).

So it’s good news that you can get some great chocolate at Coles now, unfortunately in the tea and coffee aisle there was no fairtrade product at all. Which is a shame, because they sometimes do and sometimes don’t have it, making it irritating for people looking for it. Hopefully we’ll see some more fair stuff there soon.

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