Fair Price
What is a fair price?
After watching the documentary, Black Gold, this was a question that repeatedly echoed in my head.
Based on traditional economics, we were always taught that price is set based on the interaction between demand and supply.
But reality is not as simple as it seems.
In this documentary, coffee farmers, while they are the suppliers of coffee beans, do not hold the supply power in the market. Instead, many intermediaries stand between them and the eventual end buyer and users: middlemen such as exporters and buyers purchase from these suppliers in the third-world countries to sell to the outside world.
To make things worse, these middlemen often wield disproportionately large power over the suppliers as they represent large MNCs in the developed world. Coupled with a lack of knowledge and access to information from the suppliers, suppliers are often paid much less than a ‘fair’ market price.
This price paid to them does not even give them a living wage: enough money to build schools and allow their children to have decent nutrition, for starters.
While the exact interpretation of ‘fairness’ can be subjective, I believe that income that does not even allow them to live above the poverty line is definitely unfair. This is especially so for the amount of work they have put into coffee farming.
I do not have any answers to this immensely complex and large-scale problem.
Instead I just hope to set you thinking:
When we look for the cheapest prices for our own well-being, who is bearing the costs?
Are items we purchase really only worth such low prices?
What then is a fair price to pay?
How can we, as consumers, help suppliers at large receive the compensation they deserve for their efforts?
Thinking about what goes behind the products we receive on our hands does not apply to just coffee and commodities, but to all products in general.
Awareness is our first step, and a very important one.
