If you like your sugar with coffee and cream — Hopefully fair trade sugar will soon be as easy to come by as fair trade coffee.
Okay — That statement would make a better goal if fair trade was easier to come by right now. But anyway, sugar does seem like the logical next step.
Except I don’t sugar my coffee. In fact, I really don’t have any sugar in the house. I don’t bake, so there’s just no need –
But maybe I’ll start keeping a few packets of fair trade sugar around for guests who do. The one above I got from Wholesome Sweeteners at the Natural Products Expo West.
Not only are most of their sugar fair trade, they’re also organic and unrefined. And Wholesome Sweeteners really have all kinds of sugar: sucanat, powdered sugar, light brown sugar, dark brown sugar, molasses, raw cane sugar.
You can find Wholesome Sweeteners at Co-opportunity in Santa Monica. I believe some whole foods carry fair trade sugar too. And Alter-Eco — who’s donated their organic fair trade sugar for past Fair Trade LA events — says their sugar should hit the LA market soon :)
hey Siel - long time no talk - though i’ve been keeping updated on your blog. when’s the next starbucks challenge coming around?
Comment by autopilot — April 22, 2006 @ 11:14 am
Siel, this move by Wholesome Sweetners is maybe even more encouraging than it looks. Why?
Reason #1) Along with us, and Alter-Eco, Wholesome is one of the first companies to offer FT sugar AND they’re HUGE, as in they’re a divison of Imperial Sugar, the largest sugar co. in the country. This move towards FT by the biggest company in a category stands in very sharp contrast to how large corporations in other categories (coffee, cocoa, tea) reacted, which was to either ignore or attack FT, or both, and hope that it would go away. In other categories small companies brought out FT products, and for YEARS the big multi-nationals sat on the sidelines, said that FT was unfeasible, etc. For example, if you don’t count Cadbury’s purchase of Green & Black, the chocolate corporations still treat FT like its radioactive.
For the record, FT sugar didn’t even show up in the US market until 2002, and not as a stand alone product until late 2004 (when we introduced organic FT sugar packets) and only 6 months later Wholesome started introducing FT sugars.
Reason #2) unlike cocoa, tea, and essentially coffee, FT sugar forces one to look at how US agricultural subsidies and trade barriers (ie un-free trade) can also make for un-FAIR trade. 85% of the US sugar supply is domestically produced, but in large part thanks to high trade barriers that block market access for small farmers in place like Paraguay, Costa Rica, Malawi and the Phillipines.
You can imagine how that debate/conversation could end up having a very different tone than that regarding FT coffee.
Comment by Rodney North — April 23, 2006 @ 6:20 pm
Rodney — Thanks for this interesting perspective! I didn’t know that Wholesome was part of Imperial Sugar!
BTW — It’s also great to hear from a 100% fair trade company like Equal Exchange applauding the fair trade actions of a major corp. as opposed to seeing it as unwelcome competition :)
autopilot — Good luck with the GMAT! And also — Have you met The Worsted Witch in NYC?
Comment by Siel — April 26, 2006 @ 5:17 pm