Do fair trade activists have an over-romanticized view of farming?

So says Alex Singleton, director-general of the Globalization Institute, in a short anti fair-trade documentary called The Bitter Aftertaste. He says fair trade advocates have a “romantic view of traditional agriculture,” and talks about farming as an undesirable, tiresome job that most farmers wanna get out of.

Ceri Dingle, director of Worldwrite, the org behind the film, says the same: “They might get a few pence more under fair trade, but they are still essentially being used as cheap labour and forced to eke out a meagre existence. The Fairtrade Foundation doesn’t even have a mechanisation policy, so its farmers are still reliant on hand tools.”

Luckily, other fair trade advocates have already illuminated the reasons why mechanization isn’t the answer.

First of all, fair trade certification just isn’t about making farmers modernize their equipment. “You wouldn’t expect it to,” sez Rosemary Byrde. of Oxfam GB. “It’s a certification programme.”

Plus, mechanization isn’t even an option in some areas. Barbara Crowther of the Fairtrade Foundation points out “some of the best coffee in the world is grown on steep terrain where large machines can’t always go.”

And if farmers want to mechanize, they should be able to make that choice themselves. Barbara says: “What Fairtrade does is allow farmers to invest in adopting the technologies they feel are most appropriate to their own development.”

So if you run into someone who says coffee’s best grown by machines, serve ‘em up some yum fair trade coffee and set them straight. And for farming inspiration, check out Path to Freedom, the urban homestead in Pasadena.

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