3071-The political economy of new slavery

232 Modern Slavery and Fair Trade Products
Empire was only at first an instrument of merchant capital, merchant
traders buying cheap and selling dear. It soon involved truly productive
capital, local people being set to work to produce for the
European and North American market, with all the processing and
transporting being kept in European and North American hands.
Barratt Brown, 1993, p. 17
This structure of world production and distribution with colonies providing
raw materials, agricultural products and minerals and serving as
markets for European goods, remained virtually unchanged after the
former colonies attained independence.
Fair Trade leaves the structure of such unequal exchange relations,
established by force and conquest, intact. The fact that economies of
many developing states depend on exports of a few agricultural products,
sometimes a single crop, also exported by many other Third World
countries, is left unquestioned. It is a starting point for the Fair Trade
activists that cocoa exports constitute 40 per cent of earnings of the
Ivory Coast and 30 per cent of those of Cameroon (Global Exchange [c]).
What is overlooked by Fair Trade activists is that products marketed
through Fair Trade – such as bananas, cocoa, coffee, honey, orange juice,
sugar and tea – are simply exported by too many states. This drives world
prices down and Fair Trade can help at best only a few co-operatives, like
the ones examined above. Significant expansion of Fair Trade is hardly
possible, since this would considerably reduce profits of a number of marketing
corporations and raise prices which risks reducing consumption
and thereby damaging producers. But even if Fair Trade were universalizable,
it would still leave the international division of labour, established
with colonial expansion and operating at the advantage of developed
countries, intact. This would reproduce enormous gaps in technological
and industrial development between the rich and the poor nations.
As regards Fair Trade projects for crafts like TARA projects in India, it
is indisputable that they do give to the poor an opportunity to acquire
basic skills of craftsmanship and by paying them a fair price it contributes
to their subsistence. However, how big is the market for such products
and how many producers can it sustain? And even if they are relatively
numerous, will their income from Fair Trade ever be comparable to the
incomes of Western workers?
Fair Trade as such, is a ‘problem-solving’ measure, which does not aim
at transcending the existing structures, but at making them function
more smoothly. It does not challenge global inequality as a whole, but
only its most extreme manifestations like forced labour, child labour and