Fair Trade News

Published Dec 20, 2005

THE FOOD SNOOP
by Masha Gutkin

Fair enough?

BUT FOR ITS archaic lingo, a 1909 bulletin of the American Geographic Society titled Brazil's Failure to Control the Price of Coffee reads here and there like a squib from a contemporary business page. Topics that haven't gone out of style abound: how to control the price of a fluctuating crop, international loans, attempts to predict consumption, environmental issues, overproduction, world market share.... Depending on one's nature, this unfortunate flash of the more things change, the more they don't might make one throw up one's hands in hopes of hitting on the bottle opener and drowning one's sorrows with a cold one. (Where is that Eeyore T-shirt?!)

In 1909 Brazil produced three quarters of the world's coffee. Today, responsible for a mere quarter of world production, Brazil's still at the top, with an output of 22.5 million bags of 132 pounds each in '97 and '98, followed by Colombia's comparatively meager 10 million bags.

Aroma-appropriately, the coffee bush is kin to the heady and lush gardenia. The beans of the arabica variety are more highly prized, having less caffeine and a better-balanced flavor and being higher in oil than their canephora cousin's beans, known as robusta. Robusta beans, in fact, did not get robust on the market until the 19th century, when their disease resistance became important, along with their heat tolerance. Disease is no small matter: Coffee is, per acre, the most pesticide-heavy food crop in the world, and third in pesticide heaviness overall – surpassed only by good old cotton and tobacco. (Why, those are all components of a Huck Finn summer day! Sigh.)

And coffee's got a reputation for keeping the people who farm it in a vicious cycle of poverty. Simply put, this is a result of price fluctuation in the open market. To address the issue, fair-trade proponents advocate a "fair," guaranteed price (currently $1.26 per pound) for growers, as well as working with small collective farms. Critics of fair trade bemoan its interference in the market. Some suggest that the major problem with coffee is overproduction and that fair-trade subsidies will not solve that but will instead benefit inefficient producers.

Although critics of fair trade may have a point, here's the gist: They do not appear to offer any options for more responsible consumption in the face of the unfortunate conditions of coffee farmers. According to some sources, 25 million people worldwide depend on coffee for their livelihood. That said, I say hear! hear! fair trade. In the United States, Transfair (www.transfair.org), founded in 1998, is the only fair-trade-certifying organization. Transfair belongs to the international FLO (Fairtrade Labelling Organizations International) NGO consortium, along with similar fair-trade organizations Canada, Japan, and 17 European countries.

This October witnessed a wave of criticism of the United Kingdom's equivalent to Transfair, the Fair Trade Foundation, from fair-trade supporters. Fair trade's admirers were horrified to happen upon the fair Fair Trade Foundation in bed with multinational nasty Nestle, the world's largest coffee buyer. Nestle and the foundation now have a love child, a Fair Trade Foundation-certified coffee product marketed by Nestle in the UK as "Partner's Blend." Fair-trade purists decry the foulness of teaming up with the biggest of the Big Four (followed by Kraft, Procter and Gamble, and Sara Lee). They see it as complicity with the very multinational entities the inhumanity of which fair trade is challenging. Hey, at least fair trade is reaching consumers' consciousness to the point where Nestle even cares enough to be associated with it. On the assumption that Nestle and its ilk are not primarily motivated by concern for humans' well-being, the precepts of fair trade must be making an impact on coffee consumption that Nestle and other large corporations can't afford to ignore.

October also saw an announcement from McDonald's that 658 franchises on the East Coast will soon begin selling only fair-trade-certified coffee. Nestle and McD's are not the first multinational behemoths to get friendly with fair trade. Starbucks claims that "[i]n fiscal 2003, Starbucks purchased 2.1 million pounds of Fair Trade Certified coffee, a 91 percent increase over the year before." Starbucks' fact sheet also notes that, as only 3 percent of the world's coffee is fair-trade certified, Starbucks cannot rely on the fair-trade certified supply to meet its demand. It relies on "C.A.F.E. Practices" – self-generated and self-monitored, socially responsible guidelines – to regulate the remainder of its coffee purchasing.

Although fair trade may not be a panacea, at least the external nature of its certification process is not the equivalent of a corporation's right hand shaking its left in congratulations at meeting standards. Next time in these pages: Down with preamble, up with local java on the up and up. The Snoop swears on a sack of arabica.

E-mail Masha Gutkin at lydialeapfrog@yahoo.com.