[image from Green Mountain Coffee]
[Previously: Certification challenges, part VIII: In defense of TransFair USA. The whole Certification Challenges series is here.]
In my ideal world, all socio-environmentally responsible coffee would have the fair trade certified sticker. That way, consumers would be able to tell at a glance whether or not a coffee’s good to buy.
Sadly, that’s not the case.
I’ve already talked quite a bit about big companies that do a miniscule amount of fair trade coffee, but have the fair trade certification sticker for a product or two to greenwash their image.
But that’s not what I’m talking about here. What I’m talking about are companies that, for the most part, seem pretty decent, both socially and environmentally — yet are not certified as fair trade.
The first of these groups: Activist (aka mission-based) coffee companies that broke with TransFair USA, the org that provides the fair trade certified sticker for US companies (right).
Four companies fit this bill — Cafe Campesino, Dean’s Beans, Larry’s Beans, and Just Coffee. All were, and still are, members of Cooperative Coffees, a green bean buying collective comprised of fair trade roaster/ members who’re all committed to fair trade ideals. All four split from TransFair USA in April 2004.
Why? Among other things, “Without people outside the increasingly corporate-friendly TransFair system pushing for the original vision of a better model, [the movement] will be watered down into nothingness,” said Matt Earley, cofounder of Just Coffee, in the Christian Science Monitor.
I agree — We have to put some measures in place to make sure that big corporations aren’t just using the fair trade sticker on a product or two to greenwash their entire brand. A huge concern that TFUSA needs to address.
That said, some of these mission-based companies have also done things I don’t like too much. Things that I feel have been unnecessarily divisive in the fair trade movement. And things that have undercut the ability of these small, mission-based companies to be taken as seriously as they should be.
Take Dean’s Beans, for example, which in 2003 took out a full-page magazine ad (PDF here) in Arthur that asked Paul Newman to pressure coffee roasters such as Green Mountain Coffee to buy more beans at fair trade prices.
It appears that Dean’s Beans thought that Green Mountain (sold through Newman’s Own Organics, owned by Nell Newman, Paul’s daughter) was getting more green credit than due. Back then, Green Mountain was doing about 10% fair trade coffee, though now, Green Mountain’s seriously ramped up its fair trade commitment and its organic, fair trade coffee’s being served at 658 McDonalds in the Northeast.
THEN, Dean Tycon of Dean’s Beans took out an ad in the Village Voice (PDF here), complaining that TransFair USA doesn’t reveal the percentage of fair trade coffee that so-called socially responsible companies (i.e. Starbucks) do.
A more reasonable complaint, perhaps (you gotta commend Dean’s Beans for its openness — The Inc. article that reports on both these ads is avaliable as PDFs on Dean’s Beans’ website), but Inc. reported that Dean’s Beans’ ads worked because “the company is competing for a very specific niche of customers — and if doing so means alienating mainstream clients, Cycon frankly doesn’t care.”
That makes it sound like Dean Cycon doesn’t give a shit whether or not fair trade reaches the mainstream — he simply wants Dean’s Beans itself to make moolah. That Dean’s Beans cares more about its own bottom line than about promoting fair trade.
Now I’m not saying that Dean Cycon’s just another money hungry capitalist dude. What I’m saying is that right now, mission-based companies often come across as wanting to protect their financial niche in the coffee market by trying to prevent larger companies from directly competing with them, putting their own financial interests before the fair trade movement.
That’s not necessarily true. Many mission-based companies say they’re cool with big corporations entering the fair trade market — as long as those corporations make a more sincere commitment to fair trade, going beyond tokenism and greenwashing to really move their business practices towards a sustainable socioeconomic model.
I asked Matt of Just Coffee about the whole Dean’s Beans incident. Matt said Dean, who was acting independently, likes to speak out publicly in a loud voice: “Dean has more going on with growers than any other roaster I know and we totally trust his intentions even if he works a little differently than we do.”
But while I can agree that Dean’s Beans does some awesome stuff, I think another important thing we need to focus on in the fair trade movement is working together toward common goals, perhaps saving divisive tactics to use only as a last resort.
We’ve already started the discussion about multinationals — The panel at USFT began with the question: Can transnational companies participate in the fair trade movement? Everyone said yes. The big question was, under what conditions?
TransFair USA has been criticized for its murky stance in negotiating fair trade commitments with big corporations like Starbucks and P&G — and rightly so. Statements such as these in the CS Monitor by Paul Rice, CEO of TFUSA — “If a corporate giant roasts a million pounds of fair-trade coffee in one year, they are still doing far more than some of the smaller 100-percent roasters will in their entire history.” — which boils a company’s contribution to the fair trade movement down to only cold, hard cash, don’t help.
But this isn’t a one-way street. My challenge to the mission-based companies would be to make their answer to this second question clear. Because as of now, their stance seems about as murky as that of TransFair USA. “No middle ground,” shouts Dean’s Beans’ ads. That sounds pretty, but I’m not so sure. The grays are tougher to deal with — and that’s where most of us are. Most of us who’re committed to creating change.
[The whole Certification Challenges series is here.]
March 8th, 2006 at 2:33 pm
Girl, I can hardly keep up with you. You’re giving me whiplash! :)
March 8th, 2006 at 2:41 pm
Hey Siel:
Thanks for the mention on your blog!
I agree that “divisive tactics” should be saved as a last resort. My contention is that, at least for those of us who left (and those who are now thinking of leaving, you know who you are! ;), we reached the last resort with TFUSA.
Those of us who left TFUSA did so after over a year of talks with them. In the end, their response was basically: “Thanks for the feedback. Now sit back and shut up cause we are driving this boat”. Paul’s quote in the CSM says it best and does so irrefutably — to TFUSA money trumps mission period.
Now, I know that you know that our leaving was not based on pouting for having to compete with the TNCs, your panel in Denver and its fall-out make that clear. Although, I have to say that in a way it was a factor. If TF had given us an even playing field we would not have been able to complain about this particular piece.
The SBUXs and even the Green Mountains of the world have used the TF label in ways that violate their contracts and that confuse consumers as to what their commitment levels are. They also buy huge amounts of cheaper and non-FT coffee and can sell their “fairly traded” coffee at cost or below while subsidizing with profits made from cheap coffee. That is not very fair trade-like (or nice for that matter) and THAT is what our problem is with competing with those companies in the way we have been asked to.
I don’t have a huge problem with Green Mountain (GM) and I recognize that they have upped the ante on their FT purchases in a way that should make SBUX red-faced with shame. That said, they have used the TF label in their ads as if they were a FT company and have not received (to my knowledge) even a slap on the wrist. Meanwhile, after Dean took out his ads challenging Newman’s Org/GM and when Equal Exchange publicly challenged P&G in the same way, they both got nasty letters from TFUSA about violating their licensing agreements by attacking other licensees. This selective enforcement of contracts is yet another reason why we all left soon after.
Okay, lastly I will say that although I do not agree with what ANYONE does 100% of the time, I would back up Dean any day of the week. Anyone who knows him knows his dedication to FT and to farmers and that he is anything but a fat-cat CEO scheming to rake in the big dough. To be a 100% fair trade roaster pretty much neccesitates that you will never make a mint in the coffee industry by virtue of your thin little margins. To do so would be plain wrong as the producers we depend on will never be rich either.
Lastly, lastly, thanks Siel for all of your work, research, questioning, and muck-raking. You are asking the hard questions that need to be asked of all players in this thing.
I swear to god I will slow down on the “War and Peace”-length responses for a while and roast some freaking coffee.
-Matt
March 8th, 2006 at 11:39 pm
FYI, I went to visit Matt, and he was roasting lots of coffee.
March 9th, 2006 at 12:17 pm
I appreciate your thorough discussion of Fair Trade. You’re covering the issue more thoroughly and thoughtfully than any one else that I’ve seen, including the Christian Science Monitor.
Speaking for Larry’s Beans, we left the Trans Fair fold in order to raise the bar for the industry at large, not just to separate ourselves.Â
We want to create competition for transparency and commitment. Thus, we would be DELIGHTED to see companies like Starbucks and Nestle’s go 100% Fair Trade. We’re confident of our ability to source, roast and blend awesome coffee. In our ideal world, every company is 100% Fair Trade and Organic and we compete on quality, style, and appeal.
Bring it on.
Larry Larson
el CEO, Larry’s Beans, INC
March 9th, 2006 at 12:19 pm
Nice post. Probably there is another way. As I see it Fair Trade label is like a product certification. Starbucks or Nestle can get only one of their products certified. I feel that there is a need for “process level” and “company level” certificationm like the ISO certifications. Such a certification would require a company to have all its practices meet certain social/environmental/sustainable standards to get the “Green” label. The label can then be applied to all its products.
The companies which have split from TFUSA would generally benefit from such certification and SBX will not be able to get the label. Such a label would also reflect the committment of the company as a whole towards sustainable practices.
BTW the Just Coffee link in your post is not correct I think. It just brings up a list of search results. Did you mean to include http://www.justcoffee.net/ OR http://www.justcoffee.org ?
March 9th, 2006 at 3:07 pm
Sameer — Thanks for pointing out the link oopsie ;) It’s fixed now –
Okay — I just wrote a long long comment, then decided it would be better to use it for an actual post. A new post on this coming up, really soon.
July 19th, 2006 at 4:40 pm
This is probably the wrong place for this comment, but I had a thought about MNC participation in the Fair Trade movement:
One complaint I hear by “average Jo’s” about Fair Trade is that although they may agree with the movement’s ideals, they simply are unwilling or unable to pay the premium for FT coffee. These are often people with families on very tight budgets. In one of the comments, there was a criticism of MNC’s who buy only small proportions of FT coffee and sell it at lower prices by mixing it with non-FT coffee. Although this offends FT purists, is it not a possible way to make FT coffee more affordable? Sure, it’s not perfect, but it’s a compromise at least, is it not? Maybe it would be more satisfying if the roaster could indicated what percentage of the coffee was Fair Trade? (you know, they have 100% Columbian labels - why not say “20% Fair Trade”? That would be more honest than hinting that all the coffee was FT, while still allowing budget shoppers to feel slightly better about their purchase)
July 19th, 2006 at 11:27 pm
An interesting idea, Liz! Unfortunately, what TFUSA does right now is charge between 5 to 10 cents for every lb of fair trade coffee that US roasters buy, REGARDLESS of whether or not that coffee’s sold as a fair trade certified product.
As you know, if a coffee blend has ANY non fair trade coffee in it, that blend can’t be certified as fair trade — yet the roaster has to pay extra fees for the fair trade coffee. This means there’s a financial disincentive to roasters to consider making a fair trade coffee a part of one of their premium blends.
I’m of the opinion that this is something we need to discuss further in the fair trade activist community, and possibly push to change.
August 18th, 2006 at 11:46 am
you naughty LA girl! you really should have talked to me before calling me out as a pig-faced capitalist or whatever! We do what we do , as borther Larry says, to raise the bar, even if it means taking some lumps (like I did after the Paul Newman thing-but hey, guess what? my deep throat at Green Mountain told me that it is EXACTLY the pressure from us that has helped push the cigar cchomping side of Green Mountain to up their fair trade purchases). We left Transfair after a full year of frustrating talks and a formal 100%ers working group that failed to budge Transfair in the realms of transparency, democratic process (or any process for that matter) and that foolish ten cent a pound fee of theirs (hey here’s a nifty idea, we said, how’s about sending a chunk of that back to the farmers? no way said Paul). After leaving, we modeled the veryu transparency we wanted for transfair by having an fully independent audit by QAI of our claims and purchasing practices-the first in the country. Interestingly, Transfair is talking (THREE YEARS LATER) of instituting the very things we asked for back in the day, including - get this- audits for the licensees by QAI! So I am not uncomfortable with having left or the impact we have had collectively on Transfair.
As far as the Fair Trade model goes, I have always believed that fair trade is a movement, an evolving process, not a simple formula or a strict set of rules that folks can get around or use for their own marketing purposes. Our model is a bit off the norm. We only buy from FLO certified coops and pay at least the fair trade minumum. More significantly, we have a six cent per pound profit sharing program with ALL of the farmers we work with, design and fund people-centered development projects in the coffee villages (totally at the request and co-designed with the growers), provide legal advocacy and community development against Big Oil, intellectual property protection, and whatever else is bugging the farmers (which varies dramatically from country to country). We sponsor grower visits (like bringing Esperanza up from Peru to meet Hillary Clinton and address 3500 NY teachers) and next week we are hosting Tadesse’s 15 year old daughter for two weeks (her first plane flight ever-from Ethiopia). We are arranging full scholarships at US schools for two Papua New Guinea coffee farmer’s kids next Sept, blah blah blah. The point is that to us, fair trade is a deep ethical commitment that permeates every aspect of our relationship with the farmers, not just a price point, a marketing gimmick or a one-stop handwashing for our obligations to third world communities who supply us with a good livelihood up here.
Anyway, this is a great column and I am enjoying the freespeak immensely. I can also take a few punches with moderate grace. Thanks.
August 24th, 2006 at 4:58 pm
Dean! Hello! I was just gonna try and call you — but I can’t get yr number cuz yr website’s down! And I do belive I called you before posting this one, but knowing me, it was like midnight here and like 3 am where you were, so I just hung up and posted. Which I realize is sorta a bad habit, but something I do way more often than I should — Sorry dude –
Anyway — I always enjoy being called naughty, and would love to chat — about coffee, critique vs. cooperation, the cult of personality, etc. Will try to load your site again tomorrow –