Maya coffee farmers, Chapter 23, &WP article

 The E-reserves breaks down the idea of fair trade and explains it as an alternative development by doing research on a coffee cooperative based in Guatemala. this chapter shows how fair trade has many benefits like, stable prices, helping farmers keep their farms, build stronger trade connections with other nations, and allow more money to flow into their schools and other things they need for their country. While fair trade gives benefits, it also has defects that hurt the people participating in it because the prices for anything they try to sell is too low for the people to make a profit on. The prices are so low for what they are selling because there are so many other people trying to sell the same thing globally that the world has too much of that one substance. Since there is an abundance of those materials they cost less to get because it could always be replaced. Since there are sometimes more of a product than they need it's hard for similar products to enter the global market and do well. This chapter also says how the people that are selling good on the international market have no say in how much their product is worth when they try to sell it. Th market decides how much goods sell for, not the producer of that good. Overall this chapter explains that fair trade is good on the surface level for the world, but is not the best system to make sure people of certain nations are getting the money they need to survive. 

Chapter 23 explains that the bigger globalization grows, the more and more people from wealthier countries can see how the people in poorer countries live and inspire changes to help those poorer countries creating a strong sense of global communities where the base thought is that the people in every country should be able to provide for their family without having to worry about how much money they get from their jobs. This chapter highlights the three types of inequality. The first inequality highlights the  difference in wealth between countries regardless of population, and the second inequality is the same thing but taking in account the population sizes of those countries. The last inequality measures the wealth gap between individuals throughout the world. The second inequality has decreased because of rapid population grown throughout the world, but the first and third inequality have remained higher than it should be since the 80s. Since the top 8% of wealthy people holds half of the worlds wealth, inequality 3 remains the biggest inequality within any country, but population growth of some countries are helping that statistic get reduced  only by a small amount.

The Washington Post article does a deep dive into how bad people live in the Congos where they have the raw materials to make things we use everyday and how badly it is affecting the people that mine those materials. People in the Congos mine cobalt so we can use our electronic devices but the effect of them doing this everyday as a job is bad for them. Miners are working constantly with chemicals find their way into their everyday life like in the food they eat and the water they drink. Overall the cobalt pipeline benefits the world because it provides a global commodity and works in cahoots with the global market, but at the cost of the people mining it and everything they use to survive.