do you want cream with that?

Economist has an interesting editorial Oxfam vs. Starbucks on the latest round in the fair trade coffee debate.

Starbucks also has questions about the different standards of fairness applied by the Fair Trade brand custodians in different parts of the world. It doubts even that the strategy of the Fair Trade movement, to secure farmers a premium over the market price for their beans, is the best basic approach. Starbucks prefers a code known as the CAFE practices (Coffee and Farmer Equity), which aims to help coffee farmers develop sustainable businesses through a mixture of technical support, microfinance loans, and investment in infrastructure and community development where the farmers live.

...As for Oxfam's involvement, it will be interesting to see how this battle of global brand versus global NGO develops. Starbucks has loyal customers who may well be prepared to hear out the firm's side of it and judge the case on its merits. Given the weakness of Oxfam’s arguments, Starbucks may yet emerge with its reputation enhanced, and Oxfam with its credibility damaged. Is it too much to hope that this battle may be a turning point in the war over corporate ethics, and that it will cease to be enough merely for an NGO to throw mud at a company, to have that mud stick? The Economist will drink a grande extra wet triple-latte to that.

The reference to microfinance, reminded me of the New Yorker article, "Millions for Millions" on the debate between Pierre Omidyar's(for profit) vs. Muhammad Yunus', nobel laureate and godfather of microfinance (non-profit) approach to lending.

Omidyar and his colleagues say that the biggest obstacle to commercialization of the sector is philanthropic capital. They say that it distorts the market—not only by filling channels that might otherwise draw commercial investors but also by keeping unsustainable programs alive.