Criticism
In April 2007, two Melbourne based academics lodged formal complaints with the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission to investigate Oxfam, alleging that Oxfam Australia was guilty of misleading or deceptive conduct under the Trade Practices Act, over the sale of Fairtrade coffee. They believed that Fairtrade coffee should not be promoted as helping to lift Third World producers out of poverty because growers are paid very little for their beans.
In 2008 a report criticized Oxfam’s funding and Aid projects stating that it was "fundamentally misguided" and that "Oxfam is wrong on the economics of multilateral trade negotiations"
Oxfam’s activism has been criticized for being misguided and ill-informed over a number of years. For example the organization’s stance on Intellectual property was said to be “far too quick to blame the HIV/AIDS crisis in the developing world on patents and intellectual property regimes. But their concern does not match the facts - patents are not the major barriers preventing access to vital medicines” and that the organization “may need to decide how serious they are about fixing this problem, and perhaps consider a reconciliation with private enterprise.”
Read more about this topic: Oxfam Australia
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art—and, by analogy, our own experience—more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)
“Cubism had been an analysis of the object and an attempt to put it before us in its totality; both as analysis and as synthesis, it was a criticism of appearance. Surrealism transmuted the object, and suddenly a canvas became an apparition: a new figuration, a real transfiguration.”
—Octavio Paz (b. 1914)