This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, July 28, 2022.

I'm Caleb Brown.

I drink a lot of fair trade coffee and like many coffee drinkers we tend to view the product as broadly

superior and it also helps lower-income farmers. But do the economics of those

transactions bear out that typical conclusion? Victor Klaw is an economist at Florida Gulf Coast University, we spoke last month.

Whenever I have seen the fair trade label on coffee products that I've purchased, I drink a lot of coffee. I have taken that to mean,

well, whatever the benefits are to low income people around the world, this is probably better coffee.

Yeah, a lot of fair trade coffee really is spectacular.

In fact, even though my short monograph about it that I wrote for the Acton

Institute is critical as a consumer in terms of what it's doing and how it's doing it

Equal exchanges organic love buzz is tremendous so it's a fair trade coffee that I drink not because it has the

fair trade label on it because it's outstanding. In fact it's so good. It's one of

these coffees that it can be previously ground and packaged that way and it's still a really, really great coffee.

But I don't buy it because of the label. I buy it and drink it because it's fantastic.

Well, right, and that's because it's fantastic.

Well, right, and that's the, that's another thing is that if I see coffee that's

pre-ground, I'm less likely to buy it just because, well, it's pre-ground.

That's right, me too, but in the case of organic love

buzz from equal exchange it's a fair trade coffee that's great even pre-ground.

More broadly though what are your findings about the quality of fair trade coffee and the degree to which many people it guarantees you some basic things about how the coffee's grown.

That coffee growers are members of democratically governed cooperatives

of small-scale growers. There's no child labor that's used in the production of that

...