Not Playing Fair Can Be Costly

When everyone is expected to play fair and do so – there is no problem. The problem begins with a smile and end with consequences many cannot cope with from the results of not playing fair. Not playing fair is not only unethical, immoral, and down right dirty at times, the awful thought of being cheated in some scheme or situation can bring out the most deadly thoughts if the perpetrator – does not play fair. When your ex-spouse hires someone to kill you, ask you for a swap sampling for insurance purposes, you better be alert for your life because someone is not planning on playing fair. This is just an example of not playing fair. Do you play fair all the time and not just sometimes? What about when a business partner cheats you through faulty book transcriptions? What about your spouse cheating on you? What about you were being used? What if your ex-spouse kills the children in anger? What about you were being cheated out of $50,000 at a strip club? What about your spouse lying to you that the IRS refund check never came, but you later found out that she already spent the refund? Some of the factors and lies with opinions in Not Playing Fair ... Can Be Costly!

This critical account of the fair trade movement explores the vast gap between the rhetoric of fair trade and its practical results for poor countries, particularly those of Africa. In the Global North, fair trade often is described as a revolutionary tool for transforming the lives of millions across the globe. The growth in sales for fair trade products has been dramatic in recent years, but most of the benefit has accrued to the already wealthy merchandisers at the top of the value chain rather than to the poor producers at the bottom. Ndongo Sylla has worked for Fairtrade International and offers an insider’s view of how fair trade improves—or doesn’t—the lot of the world’s poorest. His methodological framework first describes the hypotheses on which the fair trade movement is grounded before going on to examine critically the claims made by its proponents. By distinguishing local impact from global impact, Sylla exposes the inequity built into the system and the resulting misallocation of the fair trade premium paid by consumers. The Fair Trade Scandal is an empirically based critique of both fair trade and traditional free trade; it is the more important for exploring the problems of both from the perspective of the peoples of the Global South, the ostensible beneficiaries of the fair trade system.

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