I may be wrong, but fair trade is about buyers and sellers being on a level footing to trade at market forces without unfair sanctions? If this is so, why are Alliance insisting on positive discrimination against consumers choice? If people don't want to drink it, don't force them. It's a bit of a contradiction I think?

OK, endure a tourist's question, will ya?

How does Fairtrade ensure that the worker gets compensation? Do you go all the way back to Juan Valdez and pay him & the burro for his Columbia Supremo?

That's a good question, James.. Any advocates of Fairtrade care to respond?

I heard a wee rumour that there were coffee jar labels mischievously being swapped by one councillor...!

Perhaps the 'distasteful' coffee was being unfairly branded?

Isn't coffee an awful pretentious Belfasty sort of a thing ?

James, it is my understanding that much of the coffee is produced by small scale freeholders, often family businesses, they do not employ workers, certainly not on a plantation style scale.

Todays London Independent as a good article:

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/story.jsp?story=615719

Isn't coffee an awful pretentious Belfasty sort of a thing ?

Pretentious?

When Starbucks was Starbucks in the 60's there was a shop in the Pike Place Market and one in University Village. That was it. Finito.

Then the guy from Peets came up from Californy and Californicated the whole damned thing with the gimmick of infinite franchising. Suddenly, its Showtime!! and Latte Land was born with all those sprinkly thingies with which yuppies decorated their Grande's and Vente's, whatever the hell those are. You asked for a cup of coffee and all you got was a blank look They had all become pod people.

It reached it's peak when Starbuck's was written into Project Mayhem in the Fight Club script where they tumbled a piece of "corporate sculpture" into one of the franchises the night that Bob died. The first rule of Fight Club is ....

Paddy Canadanian

One of the rallying calls of the fair traders remains the collapse in 2001 of coffee prices which forced farmers to end their children's education, withdraw from long-cultivated land or switch production to the narcotic qat.
-------Indo Article

And there was the collapse of the 80's after the price of coffee reached 4 bucks Yankee a pound.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

Thereafter Juan & the burro joined FARC.

Party on.