Coffee Break

Photo courtesy of Amy Hansen and TransFair USA

Yesterday, when I wrote about Fair Trade coffee I mentioned that many of those who originally supported Fair Trade as a concept are unhappy with the way the concept has translated to reality. Like so many great ideas, Fair Trade has suffered from its own growth. According to those critics, TransFair USA, the U.S. organization that audits coffee producers and importers and grants Fair Trade certification, has watered down the mission of Fair Trade by “cozying up” to the big coffee buyers - folks like Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, Starbucks, Dunkin Donuts, McDonalds and Walmart. One of those critics, Dean Cycon, is the owner of my favorite small coffee roaster, Dean’s Beans - yep, the place where I buy my green coffee beans and my personal Deb’s Dark Dreams coffee blend.

Cycon was an active member of TransFair USA until 2004, when he says he threw up his hands in disgust and walked away after fighting for a year for more transparency in the coffee certification process. According to Cycon, the big coffee buyers are dishonest about how much of their coffee is actually purchased under Fair Trade agreements.

Others charge that when TransFair USA licenses big corporations like Starbucks and Walmart - two companies that have been openly charged with treating their own employees poorly - it waters down the Fair Trade message. In addition, many say, when someone like McDonald’s slaps Dunkin Donuts slaps a Fair Trade label on one or two varieties of their coffee, consumers make the assumption that the company purchases ALL of its coffee through Fair Trade agreements.

That’s simply not so, but you have to dig a little to get real, hard figures to find out just how much it’s not so. For example, in October of this year, Starbucks announced that it is doubling its commitment to Fair Trade and plans to buy 40 million pounds of Fair Trade coffee in 2009. That sounds pretty impressive - and it is, in some ways. It will make Starbucks the single largest buyer of Fair Trade coffee in the world, buying close to half the entire amount of coffee produced by Fair Trade certified farms and small plantations. On the other hand, Starbucks bought 350 million pounds of coffee in 2005 - the last year for which I could find a total amount purchased. When you do the math, it turns out that those 40 million pounds of Fair Trade coffee will be less than 10% of the total amount of coffee that Starbucks buys this year.

Dig a little deeper still and you’ll figure out that even if Starbucks bought ALL the Fair Trade certified coffee offered up for sale, it still wouldn’t amount to much more than a hill of beans (sorry… I couldn’t resist the pun!). While Starbucks is pushing an admirable goal - 100% fairly traded coffee buy 2015 - it’s going to take more than just negotations to get there. It’s going to take an all-out push to certify more farmers and plantations.

That may mean changing the way that the process works, or it may mean doing what Starbucks has done - setting up its own certification program for small farms and farmer cooperatives.  It may mean doing what Dean Cycon and others like him have done - walking away from TransFair and FTLO (the International Fair Trade Labeling Organization) in favor of other organizations that certify and audit growers. It may mean doing what many coffee roasters have done and going beyond Fair Trade to meet and trade directly with small coffee farmers who may not be able or willing to join coffee cooperatives.

So what does it mean to YOU if you want to make responsible and sustainable food choices? It means that the Fair Trade label is just a beginning. It represents ONE way to help alleviate worldwide poverty, but it’s certainly not a panacea.

Tomorrow, I’ll be talking about a coffee company that has been doing business in a very unique way for over 20 years now. It’s a company that’s dear to my heart because it proves, among other things, that our typical capitalist model is not the only way to run a profitable, sustainable company.  And later this week, I’ll be writing about exactly who it is that owns the brands of all those coffee labels you see on the supermarket shelves. (Hint: a lot fewer people than you think).

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