Fighting for fair trade

By Katrina Ballard and Andrea Rodi

PUBLISHED by The Daily Free Press

Purchasing a $4 latte not only hurts American consumers’ wallets but also the pockets of coffee growers in developing countries.

Tadesse Meskela, manager of the Oromia Coffee Farmers Cooperative Union in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, said his farmers are only getting paid a little more than $1 per pound for coffee beans. Life is only sustainable when the minimum price of coffee is set at least $20 per pound, Meskela said.


“Farmers suffer through cultivation, picking the coffee, digging the ground, and they only get a dollar; it’s not fair,” Meskela said. “The price of coffee has to go up so that farmers can keep producing coffee, and it’s also important for us to have enough money so that our kids can go to school and so we can have clean water.”

Starbucks Coffee is the world’s largest purchaser of Fair Trade coffee and says it is a socially responsible corporation. The Starbucks Fiscal 2007 report states, “We’re committed to seeing that farmers receive an equitable share of the purchase price we pay for the coffee they produce.”

The company announced at the end of October it would double its number of Fair Trade purchases by 2012 to 40 millions pounds a year.

“We just wanted to let people know what we’re doing, and we probably needed to do something else major to get that out there,” Brian Fisher, store manager of the 874 Commonwealth Ave. Starbucks, said.

Last year, Starbucks purchased 352 million pounds of coffee in 25 difference countries. Of that 352 million pounds of coffee, 20 million pounds was Fair Trade Certified coffee — just 6 percent.

“We get rained on our Fair Trade stance. It’s pretty unfair, to be honest,” Fisher said. “If we could purchase all Fair Trade we would; there’s just not enough quality out there.”

Starbucks also has developed its own fairly traded certification process, called Coffee and Farmer Equity (CAFÉ), with Conservation International. The company purchases 65 percent of its coffee from this “third-party” certifier, claiming CAFÉ pays farmers higher than Fair Trade.

Ronnie Cummins, national director of Organic Consumers Association (OCA), said Starbucks’ initiative to increase Fair Trade purchases is a result of pressure from consumers and activists who are skeptical of CAFÉ standards and demand more Fair Trade coffee.

“Their stock price is falling, they just closed locations . . . people are thinking twice about shelling out four to $5 for a cup of coffee,” Cummins said. “They have to practice what they preach if they want to retain their customer base.”


HOW TO TRADE FAIRLY

Fair Trade is an innovative, market-based approach to sustainable development that helps small-scale farmers and workers in developing countries gain direct access to international markets, Katie Borrow, public relations manager for TransFair USA, said in an email.

“In a world without Fair Trade, you let the markets decide, and the developing world’s producers simply aren’t on enough of an even playing field, presently, for this to work,” Borrow said.

“Small-scale coffee farmers often cannot recover their production costs or earn enough to invest in their futures, due to low prices, market volatility, lack of pre-harvest financing and isolation, creating a cycle of poverty.”

Coffee prices are set by the World Trade Organization, which is largely dominated by power countries like the United States and England. The power countries that can afford to send more than 100 representatives make decisions on coffee prices, while developing countries that can only afford to send one or two representatives have little to no input on the decision-making.

Fair Trade is an improvement over the regular coffee prices set by the World Trade Organization, Meskela said.

“I support fair trade companies 100 percent. That is why we say it is fair,” Meskela said. “They are paying double the price of the conventional price.”

TransFair USA is a nonprofit organization, one of 20 members of Fair Trade Labeling Organizations International and the only third-party certifier of Fair Trade products in the United States, Borrow said.

In addition to coffee and tea, TransFair USA certifies bananas, chocolate, cocoa, flowers, honey, rice, sugar, vanilla and wine. Every fair trade label customers see on products in the United States goes through TransFair.

Critics of the Fair Trade movement say it focuses less on the farmer and more on the prices, Fisher, of Starbucks, said. In some cases, Fair Trade prices will be lower than world coffee prices because as the market changes, coffee prices change, but Fair Trade prices are still set in stone.

Fair Trade requires that farmers live on cooperatives, which are voluntary collaborations of farmers living on shared but equally distributed farmland.

“[Cooperatives] are a good thing! Cooperatives are owned and democratically controlled by its employees,” Borrow said. “Fair Trade farmers and farm workers decide democratically how to use their Fair Trade premiums.”

Starbucks is such a large corporation that it must purchase through cooperatives, which may include 2,000 farmers with two to three acres of land each.

“We couldn’t talk to 2,000 farmers in Terazio [Costa Rica] and get good coffee,” Fisher said.

Cooperatives are not a completely good thing, as argued in the 2006 film Black Gold, a documentary on the lives of coffee farmers in Africa. Cooperatives often force farmers to move off their own land to usually smaller patches of land so that they’re able to participate in Fair Trade.

Cooperatives are also sometimes built on the land of indigenous peoples in Africa, which displaces the indigenous communities, sometimes taking away their homes and food sources, and takes a toll on the environment that was not previously used for agriculture.

“It’s one thing to pay certain percentage per pound to owners of coffee plantation; it’s another thing to pay to cooperatives of workers to share the money,” Cummins, of OCA, said.

Genuinely democratic and transparent cooperatives are an important means for organization if they are run well, Meskela said.

“The [cooperatives] have to be investigated, then, after that, if they are supporting people and bringing coffee down to producers, they are accepted by certification of the Fair Trade mark,” Meskela said. “The fairness is what you have to consider.”


WHICH COFFEE IS THE FAIREST ONE OF ALL?

Fair Trade’s restrictions are a factor in why Starbucks only purchases 6 percent of its coffee from TransFair, Fisher of the Comm. Ave. location said. Certification takes several years for farmers, and some do not have the time or capital to go through the process.

“We need quality,” Fisher said. “It’s about good stuff and having it year after year after year.”

However, CAFÉ is meant to promote fiscal transparency and ensure the farmers receive the right amount of money. The practice also supports community initiatives, such as building hospitals and schools, holding coffee tastings and establishing farmer support centers.

“We want to be a beacon of hope for a giant conglomerate,” Fisher said. “If we show the world a giant corporation can do good and give back … instead of making money hand over fist, we’re giving half the money away.”

Cummins of the Organic Consumers Association said CAFÉ is a “controversial in-house certification” that Conservation International deemed equivalent to Fair Trade. He said Starbucks finally decided to increase Fair Trade purchases after pressure from customers and activist groups.

“They claimed all along they were paying fair trade coffee, but no one ever believed it because they were making their own certifications,” Cummins said.

A customer at the Newbury Street Starbucks, Naseem Alizadeh, said she did not see any Fair Trade coffee in the shop. She said she supports Starbucks’ initiative to increase its Fair Trade purchases “if it’s legitimate Fair Trade and not just a gimmick to get us to buy it.”

Some smaller Boston coffee shops claim to be committed to fairly traded coffee. Espresso Royale sells it because of its conscious customer base, Chuck Hale, store manager, said. He said café-goers feel better about themselves for buying coffee from a company that pays its growers a reasonable price.

The shop located on Commonwealth Avenue sells Jim’s Organic Coffee, which is not under the Fair Trade “brand name,” Hale said.

“The tea company we buy from is not Fair Trade, but his tea is actually a better price to growers than Fair Trade,” Hale said. “There’s a difference between Fair Trade and fairly traded.”

Jim’s Organic Coffee purchases some of its coffee from TransFair, but the company certifies much of its products through UTZ Certified, a European organization that requires farmers to be provided with health care, clean water and education.

Jim’s also buys products that are Rainforest Certified, bird-friendly and approved by organizations like Child Aid, which protects against child labor, and Water Aid, which ensures clean water.

“It’s the lifestyle of the farmer instead of money. [With TransFair standards], we don’t know where that money is going,” Emily Sheehan, spokesperson for Jim’s Organic Coffee, said.

“With Fair Trade, you’re limiting yourself,” Hale, of Espresso Royale, said. “You can’t buy the best coffee.”

Cummins said he has only seen a Fair Trade certified coffee as the Coffee of the Day once at Starbucks, which he thinks indicates the company is not serious about Fair Trade. He said people will begin buying coffee from local competition, because those shops circulate money through the community while Starbucks’ profits go “right to Seattle.”

“They have a long way to go,” Cummins said. “Our recommendation to ethical-minded consumers is to find a local coffee shop that serves Fair Trade every day.”

Meskela said that coffee farmers advise people to fight for the poor and continue to produce sustainable coffee. He said his people do not need aid from the United States; they need to become a part of the world market and self-sustainable, but they can only do so if they are paid fairly.

“People in our country are lining up with us and campaigning to make things fair,” Meskela said. “We need activists to drink Fair Trade coffee to make the world a better place for producers and to pass on a better world to the next generation.”