Argument (WA5)(VERSION2)

02121155

余尹倫 蕭英華

Argument

Version 2

719 words

06/10/2014   

                                                              Fair Trade System

     Why there is a movement developing throughout the world to against the globalization? Isn’t globalization the best movement all human beings have ever had? Undoubtedly, globalization has brought us a bunch of benefits, such as economic growth and cohesive cooperation across nations; however, this movement seems to bring equal bad impacts, too. At some points, it plays the villain role to strike the Third World nations. Here, we are going to argue about why we should use fair trade to replace free trade; fair trade is a movement on the rise to get attention and one of the efforts under alternative-globalization. Free trade has been a system maintained for decades since economic globalization developed but when we stop and look back on the preceding years, a overwhelming fact pop up: the profit all goes to the pocket of those multinational corporations, which created the rules of this global game. Therefore, we want to be a game changer now to describe a more equal and lovely world.

    The benefits of free trade system are going to the multinationals’ pockets, so now we want to propose a better system let allow a fair competition for everyone, which is fair trade system. Instead of using free trade, we should use fair trade system now.

     Many African countries’ economic development is based mostly on agriculture, especially cash crops, such as cotton and coffee. These are work that needed to put much energy and care but only with the result of unjust prices and exploitation. In Ethiopia, most coffee farmers only get 0.1$ dollars per kilo and 1% of the final coffee price sold in the coffee shops. With so little money, they can barely survive even some farmers struggle to get fed every day, of course; they can’t afford their children to go to school. After understanding whole process of producing coffee, we can know that it is really a time-consuming procedure. In general, the coffee farmers will need to wait for four years to receive the first production of coffee beans. Based on coffee bean’s not long-lasting feature, farmers will need to sell the beans as soon as possible before them getting rotten. In terms of this situation, their chance to argue for a reasonable price with corporations declines significantly, eventually leading to their poverty-stricken state. The purpose of pushing fair trade system is to give those coffee farmers enough money to live life and relatively payment to their labor input.

     The demand for reasonable price is just the beginning. Through just price, coffee farmers across Third World, especially in Africa, will enable to provide their children education; therefore, they can increase their bargaining chips in economic globalization world in the future. The spirit of Fair Trade includes that those who benefit from this system should give back to the community. Instead of individual growth, it pays more attention to the communal development. Each communal growth putting together will provide a better groundwork for the future development and prosperity of Third World.

     Last but not least, the essential idea of fair trade is to keep a sustainable production model. By singing a long-term contract with local coffee farmers, which can ensure their livelihood, they will produce coffee beans in an eco-friendly fashion. This cooperation not only boosts economic profits of both sides but also providing the world a better way of living with nature.

     In order to express our passion to display a more just mode of trading, we post three benefits getting from replacing free trade with fair trade. According to our ingrained ideas, the reason why Third World nations is poor should attribute to their own laziness, corrupt government and so on. However, to see the whole situation in a different point of view, we first need to get rid of these prejudices.  Then we will learn that the reason for those resource-abundant countries to be poor are not just their downfall, it is actually caused by the system, the rules which are drawn up by internationally powerful nations, such as U.S.A. and U.K.     

So it is time for us to see their adversity from a justice viewpoint instead of pity. Now that we learn that free trade is not free and cheap, sharpening the disparity between rich and poor; we really need to give fair trade a deep thought.