[The whole Certification Challenges series is here.]

Looking on the bright side of fair trade certification issues, I get the impression that it wouldn’t take a whole lot to get all parties at the same table to discuss these complexities.

Yes, the issues are complex. And fair trade committed companies have brought up a large number of rather wide ranging issues currently facing fair trade certification: higher minimum prices and better pre-financing deals for farmers; a stricter minimum fair trade percentage requirement for companies that become fair trade licensees; a better oversight program to ensure fair use of the fair trade logo; a change in the way TransFair USA’s structured, etc. etc.

But more than anything else, mission based companies want TransFair USA to really listen to the issues these companies are bringing up, instead of catering overmuch to big corporations with a lot of money to throw around.

In fact, while many fair trade coffee companies have widely differing relationships with TransFair USA, most agree that TFUSA messed up a bit. Says Mark Inman of Taylor Maid Farms: “From my standpoint, TransFair has really botched up the US side of the fair trade equation.” How? “They [TFUSA] haven’t made the changes that were recommended over and over again.” Matt of Just Coffee agrees: “Honestly, a lot of us who’ve been involved in these conversations — we haven’t even felt like we’ve been taken v. seriously.”

Mark predicts that TFUSA’ll lose a lot of small to mid-size companies “unless some radical change happens. “Right now, they [TFUSA] are chasing market share — the Starbucks of the world — and they don’t have time for us [committed fair trade companies],” says Mark. “That really gets under people’s skin after a while.”

These small to mid-size companies, sadly, are often companies that really do see the value of third party certifications. Despite critiques of TFUSA, many of these companies still get fair trade certification for a bulk of their coffee. Even the 4 mission-based companies that split with TFUSA altogether in 2004 only did so after a couple years of failed discussions.

So what really needs to change? Matt of Just Coffee says “I think it’s important that TransFair has a mechanism that, in some sort of official, democratic way, takes these actors into concern and consideration.” The real problem, in his view, is that of communication and input. “Maybe all those things don’t need to be changed,” Matt says, “but they need to be talked about.”

TFUSA’s begun to make efforts toward making conversations more inclusive at the Specialty Coffee Association of America conference last month, efforts that were welcomed by many mission-based companies — including Just Coffee, Pura Vida, and others. You can read a lot more about that in a piece I wrote about that in an article for Just Things (PDF).

Still, the dialogue needs to continue, and some change that gives mission-based companies an official voice of some sort at TransFair seems necessary.

Mark calls the TFUSA snafus “a fixable problem,” and says “eventually, it’s gonna get fixed,” either through a second third party certifier, or through some big changes at TFUSA. As someone who already spends a lot of time trying to explain to others what all the different certifying logos mean, I’m really, really hoping for the latter.

[The whole Certification Challenges series is here.]

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