Fortune over at the always-excellent Bread, Coffee, Chocolate, Yoga bitch-slaps the New York Times for a stupid, shallow piece on how fair-trade coffee mainly exists to make Americans feel better about themselves:
no, what i find most comic about this coffee piece is its proud laziness, its light-weight refusal to take the subject seriously.
“the world-market price of coffee has fallen so low that, according to a non-profit called transfairusa, millions of third-world farmers are being crushed by unfair competition and cannot survive.”
those readers who stop be here even on rare occasion can’t help but be floored by that sentence.
the times has never apparently heard of the coffee crisis (and here), despite many mainstream articles on it, including one 2 years ago in the wall st. journal, of all places!
I only ever had one summer course in economics but even I know that if you can’t get a good price for your product it means you should go make something else instead.
thanks for the link. you’re really too kind.
Well, hey– its not like if a couple of coffee farmers decided to get married, they could POSSIBLY have their wedding announcement in the flagship organ of the so-called-liberal-media, now is it?
So why should we think the paper would give a &&^^% about such people the rest of the time, either?