Growers and Grocers

Fair trade coffee is something that has been in the news quite a bit lately, and I’ve seen the labels, but never known exactly what they mean. According to Transfair USA:

Fair Trade is an innovative, market-based approach to sustainable development. Fair Trade helps family farmers in developing countries to gain direct access to international markets, as well as to develop the business capacity necessary to compete in the global marketplace. By learning how to market their own harvests, Fair Trade farmers are able to bootstrap their own businesses and receive a fair price for their products. This leads to higher family living standards, thriving communities and more sustainable farming practices. Fair Trade empowers farming families to take care of themselves - without developing dependency on foreign aid.

Fair trade means that coffee growers are paid $1.26 per pound. Considering that retail coffee prices are much higher than that, how fair is it? Turns out that without fair trade coffee producers can be paid less than fifty cents per pound by middlemen and exporters that strive to keep retail prices low.

While I knew that traditional coffee growers were in tropical areas, I didn’t know that the coffee plants are easily killed by frost, so that limits the growing areas to places where frost doesn’t happen. Fair trade growers gather in co-operatives to better leverage their resources in Latin America, Africa, and Indonesia and the fair trade movement has expanded to include chocolate, tea, sugar and rice growers as well.

Find Fair Trade Coffee at this link, which lists importers in the US and Canada and also includes tea and cocoa. Most, but not all, fair trade growers are also organic, which means to me that it is a value worth paying for.