Buy Local or Buy Fair Trade?

Following on from the last post, I was discussing the issue of buying local or buying Fair Trade with a friend who runs My Greener Home.

Companies like Fairgift sell beautiful fair trade furniture or you can find a local supplier at directories such as UK Furniture Stores

It's an important topic and clearly one that defies a black & white answer. Much of the debate was prompted by the Soil Association's announcement last year that they were reviewing the organic status of all air-freighted products. At their debate entitled "The Fruits of Development” in London, Seth Dei, a director of Ghanaian fresh-cut fruit firm Blue Skies, argued:

“Our fresh-cut organic pineapple, which is certified to Soil Association
standards, may soon be refused entry to the UK because of concern over air
miles. However, we only use aircraft which are already flying passengers to and
from the UK, so are not contributing directly to carbon emissions. If the
UK goes ahead with this potential ban being threatened by the Soil Association,
then 1 per cent of Ghana’s export industry would be lost, and our growers would
lose their livelihood and be forced back into poverty,”

In response, Francis Blake, the Soil Association’s standards and technical director said

“Airfreight produces 150 times more carbon output than seafreight. We certainly
do not want to close down the operations of firms like Blue Skies and its
farmers, who have done so much to help poverty in developing nations, but
neither can we ignore carbon emissions. To that end, we have embarked on a
two-stage consultation, and next spring should have a proposed standard
available, which could suggest anything from labelling airfreighted products, as
Tesco and Marks & Spencer are already doing, to carbon offsetting, to a
complete ban, with stations in-between to help farmers in Africa find viable
alternatives to airfreighting to the UK.”

Then in The Observer in March of this was a compelling article called "How the myth of food miles hurts the planet" which investigated the different factors came to the following conclusion:

But a warning that beans have been air-freighted does not mean we should
automatically switch to British varieties if we want to help the climate.
Beans in Kenya are produced in a highly environmentally-friendly manner.
'Beans there are grown using manual labour - nothing is mechanised,' says
Professor Gareth Edwards-Jones of Bangor University, an expert on African
agriculture. 'They don't use tractors, they use cow muck as fertiliser; and
they have low-tech irrigation systems in Kenya. They also provide employment
to many people in the developing world. So you have to weigh that against
the air miles used to get them to the supermarket.'

What are your thoughts?