An interesting little spat has broken out between two of these Fair Trade organisations. The fact that both groups are wrong, in that they hurt coffee farmers, seems to be getting missed. The idea is simple, that coffee farmers get paid too little by the free market and therefore we all ought to be good little boys and pay them more.

He took a swipe at the Rainforest Alliance, which
unlike Fairtrade does not guarantee farmers a minimum price, saying:
"It doesn’t address economic sustainability."
The
Rainforest Alliance has now hit back, saying Fairtrade was "wrong to
say that our certification does not address economic sustainability. In
fact Kraft is paying a 20 per cent premium to growers for the
RA-certified coffee."
A spokesman countered that
the Fairtrade Foundation "doesn’t address environmental sustainability"
and "concentrates on 100 per cent price supports".
Fairtrade
says it guarantees a minimum price, above the market price, to farmers
and requires plantations and factories to comply with health and safety
and environmental standards. An additional premium is used for economic
or social development in the farming communities.

It all sounds so wonderful, does it not? Yet, as always, such interference in free markets has a downside. So, we are paying some group of farmers above the market clearing price. As we know this will encourage production. More production means that the market clearing price becomes lower. So all the other coffee farmers are now getting less money for their beans.
So, we have indeed made some farmers better off yet have done so by making other farmers poorer. Even this might not be too bad, if the gains equalled the losses, yet this obviously cannot be so, for there is that group of rich westerners in the middle running the redistribution scheme, and they have to get paid somehow.
Net result, a few coffee farmers get a little more money, the general price of coffee goes down, hurting many more, and a bunch of holier than thou greenies make a living out of screwing up the market. Well done lads!!! full marks.