FairTrade (I believe we are meant to honour it with CamelCase) is just the lastest marketing wheeze. Brand it up, slap a premium on it, and you've instantly increased 'choice' while at the same time introducing a high profit good. Nice work, whoever invented it.

Beer quality, he claimed, was being jeopardised by cost-cutting.

Indeed it is. Someone in the US noticed that, if you add rice syrup to your wort, you can increase the quantity of fermentable sugar and therefore resultant alcohol at very little cost. However, this adds nothing to flavor or texture or body or head retention.

But at least it's cheap. And so you can get thin pretend-pilsener for nine bucks a case.

However, the last two decades have given us the so-called "Microbrew Revolution," an explosion in availability of smaller local brands, with better (and more-expensive) ingredients and techniques. In short: it's more expensive but you can get a much wider variety of better beers now.

Meaning: the market niche that the Fair Trade people are trying to occupy doesn't actually exist: There's a high-grade product for people with the money to spend, and even the bad beer isn't brewed by subsistence brewers who depend on child labor in sweatshops for bottling.

When I was a teenager and shoplifted my beer, Miller was all I could get. Now that I pay for my beer there's beer worth paying for. It's a cool world.

The market niche Fair Trade is trying to occupy does exist - its the market for those who don't care too much about quality but do want to spend more to make themselves feel good about helping some poor foreigner.

Whether the premium actually helps those who its thought by the purchaser to help is another matter, and doesn't matter in this scheme, the illusion of doing good is enough.

The CAMRA (CAMpaign for Real Ale) wags seem to persistently push the line that real ale are constantly threatened with extinction. Yet every year at the CAMRA beer festival in London (last year in Earl's Court Exhinbition Centre), there seems no end to the varieties of real ale from around Britain. There is a market for beer traditionally "beard filtered", and JD Witherspoon know this.

Your former publican's business model does work, there is a great little bar, litterally called the Microbar on Lavender Hill, just down from the intersection with Queenstown Road, who specialise in foreign beers, but there is hardly a pub in London that doesn't serve some form of the premium stuff.

On the Fairtrade (TM) issue, if people want to pay a premium for a below standard product if it generates a (false, in my opinion) sense of wellbeing and charitableness, and someone is willing to risk their own capital to provide such a beer, then all is well in the world of free enterprise.

Brendan: you're right about FairTrade being free-enterprise. The reason so many of us keep harping on about why that sense of charitableness is false, is that (i) it comes from the same BBC school of economics that causes so many other problems and (ii) it's only a matter of time before some politician argues for regulation or tarriffs in favour of it.

I'm not surprised by Weatherspoons. It's offering a range, just as Sainsburys will sell identical tasting organic bananas next to cheaper standard variety. Free trade shoppers can make their choice alongside the liberals.

Those who prefer Free trade to "fair" trade can take some heart from the fact that Fairtrade encourages lower prices in the non FairTrade alternatives. FairTrade does this both by stimulating over production because it sets a price floor, and also, by dampening some demand for the non FairTrade alternative.

But of course this is the law of unintended consequences at work here. The proponents of FairTrade do not wish at all to make prices drop for the consumer, and were FairTrade to become dominant in any given market, the downward pressure on non Fairtrade prices would disappear.

So having a FairTrade alternative is quite acceptable so long as it remains a minority taste. Should FairTrade propagandists succeed at some point by managing to attach a general stigma to non-FairTrade alternatives then the outlook will be very poor. I expect at that point the state would seize the chance and step in to move the scheme from a voluntary to a regulated one. The consequences of that are obvious...

Tristan Mills wrote:

The market niche Fair Trade is trying to occupy does exist - its the market for those who don't care too much about quality but do want to spend more to make themselves feel good about helping some poor foreigner.

I'd generally agree with this, except that I'd put "helping" in sneer quotes -- I don't think it really does help the third-worlders.

Also, is anybody else extremely uncomfortable with Fa Irt Rade [sic*] as one joined-up word? It, and a whole host of other examples, reminds me of George Orwell's Newspeak, where such compounds (or more precisely compounds based on abbreviating the word elements) were deliberately formed with the express intention of influencing people not to think about the meanings behind the root words.

* deliberately broken up in the wrong places to make people stop and think

Don't see the point of fair trade beer and wine. It's not as if English breweries and French vineyards are running red with the blood of exploited workers.

I'm guessing fair trade beer puts in an additive like coriander or vanilla or some other spice which they can say is "fairtrade" just so they can slap a label on it.

I'm cynical of why they need to do this. If it's a good beer, it should be able to sell well. If it can't, it makes me think that they've slapped the label on it to add value to an inferior product. I'd tend to avoid fairtrade beer for that reason.

Rob,

It would be an extreme turn of events if the state stepped in to regulate food to the extent of enforcing fairtrade type requirements. Anyway, the Fairtrade lot are likely to fall foul of the foodmiles global warming scare.

As far as the beer is concerned, exactly how much Fairtrade sugar and honery go into a pint?

Whoever came up with FairTrade is a marketing genius. What other brand is backed by major religions and promoted by their ministers from the pulpit? That guy deserves every penny he's making out of this, whether you believe the spiel or not.

I sincerely hope he doesn't, by the way, and is at present lounging on an enormous yacht in a jacuzzi of champagne with a cigar he can barely lift, surrounded by beauty queens, laughing like the proverbial drain at the gullibility of the well-meaning.

I find the alternative profoundly depressing.

Foreign beer = piss.

Real Ale = Excellent Beer.

(Forgive the incoherence of this post; 8 pints of the latter on board).

Local Wetherspons: Real Ale, £1.50 a pint.
Quaker Coffee House, Darlington: Real Ale £2.10 to £2.50 a pint.

I drink in the Quaker. Reason? Beer better.
Even the same beer in both places?
Beer better in the Quaker.
Why? Landlord looks after it.

For most products it don't matter how it's kept in the warehouse. Not true for beer.

Sorry guys, I am not one of the "I like beer, me" crowd, so my comment will be shredded as immaterial.

Before it is, may I say this. A colleague of mine always said that CAMRA was a classic case of a handful of people getting more influnce than they deserved. Years ago a few people started a wittering campaign over the imagined state of beer and the breweries panicked that someone may not like their products.

The reasonable response would be tell them to go stick their head in their homebrew kits, but the whole thing suddenly got a momentum it never deserved. It was just a fucking drink, for heaven's sake. One that often makes lives a misery for someone else, whatever its flavour.

(Stands back to receive broadsides of hate from real men as soon as they get home from the pub)

Watneys Red Barrel
To you good sir!

FairTrade beer and other products are a form of private charity; that is part of the economic freedom Samizdata advocates. In systems of economic slavery that private charity can not exist, it is replaced by forced charity and the multiplicity of government programs we all suffer under.

Living in Belize (formerly British Honduras) I see the positive benefits of FairTrade branding for local farmers. They enjoy a higher standard of living than the victims of local statism and international corporatism. And isn't that the point of capitalism? More prosperity for more people? It is the masterpiece of humanism.

What else has the third world to look forward to? Long the victims of European statists, now the victims of local statists and European and North American corporatists, they have nothing. Absolutely nothing. No hope. And in that kind of environment where men are barely men and basic human and property rights are not properly respected you can not count on a somewhat free market to set proper prices. Those prices are made artificially low by groups just as wicked and devilish as the groups Samizdata opposes. Violence and the threat thereof that these corporations use is not free markets or free trade.

I am starting a company here and I will pay my farmers higher prices for premium produce because I believe they are worth it. I will pay them what I think they are worth, not the lowest price I can possibly get. Because, like I said, the lowest price I can possibly get is only attainable because things are not right. Why should third world'ers continue to suffer so Europeans and North Americans can continue to enjoy artificially low prices? Our corporations, run by the same monsters that support and elect big government statists across the world, are not helping. As capitalists you should not even suggest such a thing.

It makes me angry and it should anger you. Corporatism is as big a threat to freedom in our world as statism was in the 20th Century or theocracy in the Middle Ages.

As for the taste: a Canadian expatriate living in Belize can't tell Englishmen anything about beer.

A bit more:

Is it any wonder that the third world is in third and not second, or even tied for first, given their constant oppression by statists, corproatists, theocrats abroad and the lack of markets for their natural resources and cheap manufactured goods because of those same people at home with their protectionism and socialism? It is a double-whammy. And we haven't even looked at the undoubtedly negative effects of our interventionist, rather than isolationist, foreign policies.

Maybe I'm wrong. But if you edited "Economics in One Lesson" to say business where it says government, Hazlitt would be talking about the third world's present situation.

FairTrade beer and other products are a form of private charity; that is part of the economic freedom Samizdata advocates.

Freedom is good. However, that does not preclude us from saying "What a fracking idiot" when a person exercises his freedom in a stupid manner.

Living in Belize (formerly British Honduras) I see the positive benefits of FairTrade branding for local farmers. They enjoy a higher standard of living than the victims of local statism and international corporatism. And isn't that the point of capitalism? More prosperity for more people? It is the masterpiece of humanism.

When I was last in non-British Honduras, "fair trade" didn't do so much of value. It prevented growers from hiring laborers which had two undesirable consequences: not enough manpower to push product out the door, which meant less product sold, which meant less money coming in; and the labor not hired was even more dependent on the welfare state, such as it is in poor countries. Yeah, the laborers who didn't get hired were saved from exploitation. They were also saved from having an income, eating, and getting to participate in the rest of the world.

And in that kind of environment where men are barely men and basic human and property rights are not properly respected you can not count on a somewhat free market to set proper prices. Those prices are made artificially low by groups just as wicked and devilish as the groups Samizdata opposes.

So, the solution is what, then? I'm curious about how artificially-inflated prices with strings attached are supposed to protect private property. Or how prices are made "artificially low." If the growers aren't getting a satisfactory price from Buyer #1, then what stops them from selling to Buyer #2 instead? Is Buyer #1 given a government-issued monopoly?

If that's the case, how does FT's artificially-inflated price solve this problem?

It makes me angry and it should anger you. Corporatism is as big a threat to freedom in our world as statism was in the 20th Century or theocracy in the Middle Ages.

As much as General Motors and Microsoft are run by disgusting people, I don't generally worry about being roughed up by their hired goons. Corporations have very little power to screw with my enjoyment of a free market, without somehow getting their mitts on the reins of government. I can't stand GM, but it would take government to force Toyota to raise the prices on their pickups to the point where GM's rattletrap crapboxes are competitive.

As for the taste: a Canadian expatriate living in Belize can't tell Englishmen anything about beer.

If you can climate-control a room to hold 45oF for three months at a time, you can make pilsener. At 60oF, you can make California Common Lager or most ales. There are options beyond San Miguel. (Or, you can just pitch wine yeast into crushed sugarcane like everybody else in LATAM does. 15% ABV covers a multitude of sins. Just don't tell the local version of BATFE that I told you to do any of that stuff. I would never encourage moonshining and bootlegging!)

Sunfish wrote:

Just don't tell the local version of BATFE that I told you to do any of that stuff. I would never encourage moonshining and bootlegging!

You've reminded me of the grape brick.