You might wonder why Starbucks even goes to the United Students for Fair Trade convergences, considering how many fair trade activists are unhappy with Starbucks. Is the mermaid really interested in hearing activists’ thoughts? Well — At least one Starbucks employee got really, really miffed when Matt Earley of Just Coffee spoke his mind during one of the workshops.

Apparantly, some students — who work with Dean’s Beans, a 100% fair trade roaster that has opted against fair trade certification — “were asked by an audience member about why they would work with Dean Cycon when his company did not use TransFair USA certification.”

So of course Matt spoke up. He says that while “trying to address this in Dean’s absence, I used the shaky participation in the FT market of companies like Starbucks as an example of why Dean’s, Just Coffee and some other roasters did not want to be associated with TFUSA.”

Here’s what ensued, in Matt’s words:

This criticism did not please another audience member who happened to be a rep of SBUX’s “Sustainable Coffee” department [Siel’s note: The Starbucks representative here is Aileen Carrell, manager of green coffee sustainability, which Matt found out later]. She shed some much needed light on some little known facts for us, which basically confirmed some of the things that we all suspected.

According to this person, SBUX does not think enough about how it markets its coffee. According to her, it had never occurred to them to “beat their chests” about the work that the do with farmers, although she felt they possibly should. This was very enlightening to those of us who have cynically felt that SBUX used fair trade strictly for marketing purposes. Shockingly, according to her they do not put much emphasis on marketing and advertising. Who knew?

After the SBUX rep introduced herself with these remarks, there was a bit of a feeding frenzy as students questioned her about some of her company’s practices. During the next ten minutes of candid Q&A, she confided in us that SBUX does not publish its contracts and other data because consumers find them to be “very confusing”. Apparently their lack of transparency is for our own good. She also admitted that SBUX is not interested in drastically increasing their FT coffee saying that “we will never be 100%”. This was not a huge surprise. However, her admission that they would not even commit to 5% “at this time” spoke volumes to their “committment” to the FT model.

Finally, she confided in us that not even all of the coffee that SBUX buys from co-ops is bought under FT terms, even if those co-ops are FLO certified. When challenged to commit to buying all co-op coffee under FT terms, she politely declined saying that it was “an interesting idea”, but that she would not commit to it.

With that she basically packed up her things and left the room before the workshop was over. She was promptly followed by a few students who were not satisfied with her responses and wanted to continue. The students willingness to engage her with hard and direct questions was really exciting. Two coffee producers who were present for the exchange seemed to especially enjoy it.

What was the original workshop about? It was “a workshop given by a group of students working with Dean’s Beans to facilitate a partnership between themselves, Dean’s, and the Oro Verde Cooperative in Peru.” Matt, being the critic cum optimist he is, brightly calls this event “one great example of the evolving critique of student-activists.”

Just Coffee’s a 100% fair trade committed roaster that opted against certification, which I wrote more about here. You can read about how I ran into a Starbucks gal at the last convergence — who’d been avoiding me cuz she didn’t want to answer questions about the Starbucks Challenge.

[Reports from the 2007 United Students for Fair Trade covergence from Matt Earley of Just Coffee. Jean of TransFair USA was also going to give us her viewpoint, but never made it to the convergence due to flight cancellations.]

Update, 2/23/07: Matt puts up more about the USFT convergence here.

Tags: coffee, fairtrade, starbucks, usft

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