You probably won’t be surprised to find out that only a lonely 1 percent of Starbucks coffee is fair-trade certified.

But this might surprise you: Starbucks is the single biggest buyer for fair trade coffee, according to United Students for Fair Trade. Meaning that the 1 percent of fair trade coffee they sell is more coffee than the 100% fair trade coffee line sold by more progressive companies, like Equal Exchange.

Herein lies the problem with huge corporations like Starbucks — They can make really, really big things happen. And though they seem less — fair — than 100% fair trade companies, they still sell a helluva lot more fair trade coffee than any of the lil’ grassroots startups. And it’s hard to actually hate a corporation when it’s “the biggest single, private lender to small coffee producers, having committed $8.5 million in loan capital in recent years to Massachusetts-based lender EcoLogic Finance,Conservation International of Washington, and the Calvert Foundation in Maryland,” according to a Dow Jones article.

So Starbucks actually helps a lot of farmers in need — It’s just that they could do so much more. If Starbucks went 2% fair trade, that would create some serious changes.

Starbucks gives the same excuses as The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf (which I wrote about here and here); they sent me back a form paper letter when I emailed them, which I guess means enough people have bothered them about it that they have a form letter set up. Their excuses are: that they pay damn good prices for their coffee even if the coffee isn’t fair trade ($1.20 a pound last year, versus the $1.26 fair trade price), that they really help out their farmers a lot regardless of fair trade certification (check out the well-publicized pictures of their work here), that the real problem isn’t them, but the people who buy and sell and encourage farmers to grow cheap, worthless coffee, and of course, that a free trade economy is a good for everyone (teehee).

But these big companies have one good-ish excuse — that people don’t really buy fair trade coffee, or organic coffee, for that matter. They say they will in surveys and stuff, but they don’t, sez The Coffee Bean.

Is this true, friends? Are you buying fair trade coffee? ARE YA?

Of course, Jay at The Coffee Bean added, with a slight smirk, that the one organic coffee (picture left) they carry is their worst quality, worst tasting stuff. Since people don’t buy it, there’s no incentive to carry additional types of organic coffee, he says.

Um, did it occur to them that maybe people aren’t buying that one organic coffee because it tastes shitty? Or that if they offered yummy organic fair trade coffees in the stores, instead of only selling bagged beans, people might buy more of the good stuff?

I just don’t think Starbucks and The Coffee Bean can say customers aren’t conscious consumers unless these coffee companies really offer conscious choices to consumers as a yummy, don’t-have-to-make-a-stink-about-it-and-look-like-a-high-maintenance-bitch-in-the-coffee-shop option.

**Update, 9/2/05: Says Jay about Trader Joe’s: “the money’s good, the insurance is good, and the 401k is better than what we’ll get as professors (oracademic professionals or whatever we’ll be called). Seriously, I checked it against my dad’s plan at the University of Arizona. It’s better.”

fair trade

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