Fair Trade News

Tastes: Drink Great Coffee, Feel Virtuous Too

By Mark Pendergrast
From Wine Spectator magazine, September 30, 2006 issue

Fast-food chains and big-box stores are finding a conscience, at least when it comes to coffee.

Although I hesitate to admit the fact to readers of Wine Spectator, I recently visited my local McDonald's, near Midas and KFC on Route 15 in Essex Junction, Vt., and bought a cup of, surprisingly, really good coffee. A brochure came with it, adorned with the familiar golden arches and headlined "Fair Trade Certified Coffee, Sourced & Roasted by Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, Newman's Own Organics." (Green Mountain sources and roasts Newman's beans.)

Inside the brochure, the simple question, "What is Fair Trade coffee?" was followed by a simple answer: "Fair Trade means better coffee for you, and a better life for farmers."

Unlike a lot of advertising claims, this one happens to be true. And amazingly, McDonald's franchises throughout New England are serving this coffee.

The Fair Trade program promises that a "fair price" is paid to family farmers for their products. Certification in the program is strictly monitored from tree to cup by nonprofit organizations and guarantees that small farmers who grow coffee in democratically run cooperatives receive a reasonable price for their beans. Other criteria, such as sustainable farming practices, must also be met. (Unfortunately, certification is not available to larger farms, some of which would willingly participate in the program.)

When Fair Trade Certified coffee first hit the market in the late 1980s, it was regarded as a left-wing oddity, a fringe effort by a few do-gooders. Coffee connoisseurs sneered at the poor quality of the beans, produced by cooperatives of campesinos, or peasant farmers, and doubted that there would be a viable market for coffee with a social conscience. Sure, the program meant that the farmers would get a better price, by cutting out rapacious middlemen called coyotes, but who was going to buy the beans, and how would they be marketed? Fair Trade coffee seemed doomed to attract only a tiny percentage of the huge coffee market.

The program, though, has come into its own in the past few years and has been reproduced for a variety of other products, such as cocoa, tea, rice, sugar, bananas, mangos, pineapples and grapes.

Why is the coffee so good?

Fair Trade growers are encouraged to educate themselves about cultivation, pruning, processing and other technical issues. During the disastrous worldwide coffee crisis of 2000-2004, when the commodity price of regular beans fell far below a dollar per pound, the Fair Trade growers continued to receive a decent price for their beans—at least $1.26 per pound (and $1.41 for organic). That meant that Fair Trade farmers could afford to take care of their trees, to fertilize with mulch, to prune carefully and to steadily improve the quality of their harvests. So paying people adequately for their products has turned out to be not only a matter of conscience, but also of quality: You really do get what you pay for.

Actually, though, you don't have to pay that much for Fair Trade coffee. The cup at McDonald's cost me $1.42, including tax. Starbucks sells its Fair Trade beans for the same price as its house blend. At other roasters, you may pay $11 per pound for Fair Trade beans instead of $10 for the competition, but that adds only a couple cents to the price of each cup.

If you visit a cooperative—perhaps in Central America or Africa—that grows Fair Trade coffee, you can see the difference that those couple cents make. Children can afford to buy shoes and attend school. Women can start small businesses and have better access to reproductive health services. Families can rebuild homes after a catastrophic event, such as an earthquake, as in El Salvador, or genocide, as in Rwanda.

TransFair USA, the Oakland, Calif.-based organization that certifies that the Fair Trade criteria is met, works with 500 North American companies in more than 40,000 retail outlets. The companies now include Costco (all Kirkland Signature coffee is Fair Trade Certified), Dunkin' Donuts (all its espresso drinks use Fair Trade Certified beans) and Sam's Club.

Fair Trade is good business in every sense. Most consumers want to feel good about what they buy, and more and more of us are educating ourselves about the food chain, wanting to know where our food comes from and who grew it. The mystery to me is not why McDonald's would try Fair Trade beans in New England, but why it hasn't yet gone nationwide with the program.

Mark Pendergrast is author of Uncommon Grounds, a history of coffee.

Originally printed in Wine Spectator magazine, September 30, 2006 issue