While I don’t think fair trade certification’s totally watered down, I think there’s room to critique certification — and one fair trade company in the US’ finally started a blog ’bout the issue (among other issues).
Yep — Equal Exchange, one of the first fair trade companies in the US, has a blog now, titled Small Farmers. Big Change.
Equal Exchange is all about the co-ops, being a co-op itself. Writes Equal Exchange’s Phyllis Robinson: “The kind of change I’m referring to goes an extra step beyond those that affect one or more individuals; it’s the larger-scale social change that can happen when people become organized.”
Phyllis calls for a return to the beginnings of the fair trade movement. “Small-scale farmers and their co-operatives were the heart and soul of the movement,” she says. The goal of the movement, basically, is to support and nurture co-ops into actualizing themselves. Asks Phyllis: “What if I know that through my purchases, and the way I do business, an entire co-operative and their members’ communities can develop according to their own vision?”
It seems to me that what Phyllis says works incredibly well in terms of coffee, which is mostly produced by small-scale farmers who are / could be organized into co-ops. The issue becomes immensely more complex when it comes to other products like tea, chocolate, or bananas, which are mostly produced by estates / big farms owned by corporations. The question there becomes whether it’s more beneficial to work with the few co-ops there are (v. empowering, but for a v. limited population) or with corporations (less directly empowering, but possibly beneficial for a much larger population).
In the arguments I’ve heard about fair trade and co-ops, companies like Equal Exchange will focus their end of debate mostly on products like coffee that lend themselves well to the co-op argument, while other orgs — say, TransFair USA, which awards the fair trade stickers for products sold in the US — focus on tea and bananas as a way of rationalizing their own stance that allows for non-co-ops.
Of course, Equal Exchange — and other co-op committed companies — are still relatively small, and the co-op producers they support for any product, whether coffee or tea, see great benefits from their relationship with their US companies / co-ops. I do wonder though: Does Equal Exchange believe big companies, in fulfilling much larger consumer demands, should adapt to working with many many smaller co-ops? Or is Equal Exchange’s co-op commitment simply an effort to help balance the scales, since big corps currently ignore co-ops altogether?
Back to Phyllis’ post:The ensuing discussion has (so far) attracted just 5 comments — but all 5 are super involved and super long. It’s sort of an illustration of why so many people lose patience with being part of a co-op — even while the comments themselves are, in fact, interesting, entertaining, and engrossing.
Siel,
As always, another great post on a thorny issue. I would have responded earlier, but I’ve been away & I can’t get to your Q’s right now but I will mention that the current & potential small-farmer sector is bigger than you might think.
For ex, in cocoa about 90% of the world’s cocoa is grown by about 2,000,000 small-farmers. While a relatively small portion of them are TODAY members of Fair Trade registered co-ops many others are in non-registered co-ops (so possibly just one step away from Fair Trade eligibility) or could join existing FT co-ops or could be organized in co-ops, etc. Interestingly in Utz Kapeh’s efforts to create a cocoa supply chain free of forced child labor one of their first steps was to declare that they’d only work with farmer co-ops. It was quickly apparent that it was the only practical approach to creating a more ethical supply chain.
Likewise, despite the high-profile of tea estates in the tea industry I’ve read (but forget the source) that in fact over 1/2 of the world’s tea is actually grown by small-scale farmers.
Lastly, even in crops that ARE currently dominated by plantations, like cut-flowers, there is the potential to nurture a small-farmer co-op sector, which is the kind of thing we’re trying to do where the opportunity presents itself.
For example, in the rooibos market about 98% of production comes from large scale South African plantations that were established during the colonial/Apartheid erass, and which pushed the original black African farmers off the best rooibos land. We could have said “alright, we’ll just work with the best of a bad situation and buy Fair Trade tea from these plantations”.
But we don’t find that as motivating as working with the two co-ops of small-scale Khoi San farmers who represent that dwindling 2% of rooibos production. We don’t find this a well-meaning but marginal effort. Rather it feels like the best way to leverage our – for now – relatively small buying power for the greatest effect. There’s no reason why other Fair Trade importers in all kinds of categories cannot similarly maximize their impact, support co-ops, and help grow the overall farmer co-op sector so that it can consistently supply all of the FT consumer markets, just as it does now in coffee, cocoa and sugar.
Comment by Rodney North — July 14, 2008 @ 7:53 am
More from Rodney North, who’s having some glitches with commenting:
AN EQUAL EXCHANGE RESPONSE – CONTINUED
I wanted to be sure to get to Siel’s very good question “ Does Equal Exchange think the big companies should adapt to working with many, many smaller co-ops?”
Yes, we do. Doing so is the right thing to do. It is economically & commercially viable. And where there is insufficient supply today the co-op sector can be scaled up.
Re: It’s the right thing to do
As we’ve asserted elsewhere co-ops, unlike plantations, are democratically organized enterprises. This is not only a good thing unto itself but often of extra importance in communities and countries with otherwise weak or non-existent democratic traditions and entrenched political and economic elites. Buying from plantations, even ones that sincerely do right by their workers, largely re-inforces the current power dynamics (with a caveat for when plantations recognize unions in countries where unions are still heavily suppressed).
Unfortunately, too often the large players not only decline to buy from co-ops they sometimes actively try to undermine the co-ops. One technique we’ve seen in Ecuador is for the larger commercial processors &/or exporters to temporarily raise the prices they’ll pay small coffee farmers so high that the co-op cannot compete. Unable to buy and export coffee the co-ops go out of business. In subsequent harvest seasons, with the co-ops gone, the processors can again drop the prices they pay farmers.
Re: economically & commercially viable
Small-scale farmer co-ops, in both developing and developed nations, already operate successfully in almost every imaginable agricultural sector. And, looking more broadly at the viability of the co-op model, all the world’s cooperatives combined are larger than the Fortune 500 companies combined.
Re: scaling up
A common refrain, especially from Starbucks, is “co-ops cannot supply all the coffee, etc. we need” and therefore they need to buy from plantations. Even in cases where this might be true at the moment it does not follow that the importer cannot leverage its buying power over time to help the co-op sector scale up, and to then steadily increase the company’s purchases from that growing supply of co-op-produced coffee, tea, flowers, etc.
In fact large corporations are masters at this kind of long-term supply chain thinking – when they want to. If they decide they need X and know they’ll need more & more X in the years to come, and there is too little supply they’ll do whatever it takes to grow the supply.
Toyota does this with their car-part suppliers, who are often small family-owned businesses. Companies will enter into multi-year contracts, complete with favorable financing and technical assistance to help their suppliers grow to meet future expected demands.
We and other dedicated Fair Trade importers have worked in this manner with farmer co-ops for years. This is one reason why the small coffee farmer co-op sector has scaled up so very impressively over the last 20 years. And that hasn’t necessarily represented more coffee being grown (and therefore theoretically contributing to excess global supply), but rather it means that coffee is being re-routed and is reaching the market via a different path, namely through co-ops, instead of via coyotes and conventional traders. ( I mention this as casual observers too often mistakenly theorize that Fair Trade encourages over-production and therefore is still-defeating.)
It is this kind of support for co-ops that we are asking of both our corporate peers in the food industry and of the Fair Trade certifiers. And this is why it’s reasonable, and not a quixotic notion, to ask they stop pushing for the easier quick fix of certifying plantations in pursuit of ramping up volume as quickly as possible.
Comment by Siel — July 18, 2008 @ 3:55 pm
I agree that that fair trade certification isn’t totally watered down, but I think it’s on a very slippery slope. As Rodney has pointed out, it’s totally false to say that the majority of bananas and tea are not produced by small farmers. More importantly, allowing plantations into the fair trade system ensures that they never will be. I would buy the argument that the majority of the world’s tea, bananas and cocoa for export are grown by plantations and large-scale agriculture. But seriously, fair trade exists to support small farmers because plantations dominate banana and tea production for export. It aims to create the systems that would allow small farmers to benefit from exporting those products.
Allowing plantations into the fair trade system is not only a complete departure from the principles upon which fair trade was created, but a betrayal of the farmers who built it, and a continuation of the marginalization of small farmers in the most impoverished countries in the world. Fair trade was created to support organized small-scale producers and connect them to export markets in response to the failure of plantation economies, and development policies designed around centralized ownership and production, to affect transformative change or economic growth that empowers and benefits people. Plantation-based fair trade is a slightly less gruesome extension of colonialism and slavery, and a system that for half a millennium has served only to increase global inequality.
Economic history has been a stream of “slight improvements”; colonial powers invaded the “south”, appropriated the land and resources, enslaved or murdered most of the population and marginalized the rest to the least productive lands. The end of political colonialism saw European plantation owners, regional despots, “princes” and “rajas”, who thrived under colonialism by adopting the disastrous plantation model, quickly fill the gap of colonial magistrates and virrey. Slavery was replaced by share-cropping and “slavery lite”. Colonial interests were replaced by American and British business interests, and then transnational business interests like Chiquita and Cargill; all of whom continue to rely on the plantation model to extract resources and “produce” profits; with the added benefit of decreasing production for local consumption, making laborers more reliant on food imports; graciously provided by Cargill. Plantation fair trade does not offer a viable economic alternative to global poverty, exploitation and marginalization; it strengthens the very system that caused it.
Without the fair trade system to provide credit and access to export markets, there is no chance a small farmer with a few acres dedicated to subsistence agriculture and a small plot of bananas could compete with Chiquita, its $4.6 billion in annual revenue, and gargantuan banana plantations. In the case of bananas, 22% of banana production is intended for export; so called “dessert bananas”, as opposed to their starchier cousins, plaintains, which are a dietary staple, grown by millions of small farmers across the southern hemisphere. Bananas could be a viable and potentially lucrative and empowering market for small farmers, but allowing plantations into the fair trade system has marginalized small banana producers even further and ensure that bananas never will be.
Even the United States has failed to rectify the destruction of its slave/plantation economy through slight improvements. Starting with post-Emancipation Proclamation share-cropping, the advent of the “minimum wage”, the civil rights movement and then affirmative action, improvements (similar to what plantation fair trade would represent) to the current labor model have not addressed, corrected or righted the destruction of the colonial-slave model. Are African-Americans better off today than they were in the early 1800’s? Yes. But that leaves much; everything, in fact; to be desired: African-American men are more likely to go to jail than college , and are more than twice at likely to be unemployed than white Americans . Plantation fair trade ignores the failures of “more fair” plantation-based economies throughout history.
What did work in the United States was an economy based on small land-holders in the Northeast and a decreased reliance on mono-crop exports. Fair trade attempts to strengthen those economies in developing countries; to invest in small land-holders, who have the opportunity to accrue transformative assets like land (in the United States it is estimated that 44% of the average American’s wealth is in land or housing ) and are infinitely more self-reliant through local cooperation and subsistence production. On a national level, vibrant local economies decrease dependence on foreign aid, food imports, and investment, and strengthen the ability of governments to resist egregious trade agreements and concessions.
And why, you have to wonder, are plantations and Wal-Mart so eager to join the fair trade system (well… to gain access to the certification)? Is it the goodness of their hearts? Or in that case wouldn’t they just pay workers a fair wage because it’s the right thing to do? Is it to raise their production costs through higher wages? To lower their margins for the benefit of Honduran banana farmers? Or is it that the success and hard work of small-farmer cooperatives and alternative trade organizations has led corporations and plantations to see the potential for profits in the fair trade system. Plantations, corporations and venture capital are banging on the doors of fair trade; begging for more quantity, more products, bigger, better, more streamlined supply-chains and relaxed regulations, because they see an opportunity to increase margins within their existing supply chains (i.e. plantations). They see people paying more for a tiny stamp on a bag of coffee; they want a piece of it. The farmers who built fair trade certainly don’t want plantations in the system. I don’t know any consumers who are demanding that plantations being included; if anything they want more fair trade as they know it, because they trust the seal and the ideology for which it once stood.
Cooperative fair trade is about empowerment, of people (both producers and consumers), communities, developing countries. For over twenty years, farmer cooperatives in the fair trade system have organized as a social and political force with which to be reckoned. Communities, tied together through economic ownership, have defined their values and developed each other and established their own paths of economic development. They are asserting influence and fielding politicians. Women have been empowered through shared assets and accountability, and development projects. Children are attending schools. Communities are growing their own organic food and rehabilitating the land. They are tiny green patches in the scarred and barren landscape of a scorched earth policy; vibrant local economies that value people and their connection to the earth.
Plantations, even those with labor unions and fair wages, represent continued dependence on patriarchal land-owners, predatory capital markets, transnational corporations and developed countries. American consumers should not be duped into supporting plantations because they agree to pay their workers a “fair wage”, we should be investing in a viable alternative that doesn’t rely on cheap labor and minority ownership. Allowing plantations into fair trade threatens to reverse the gains of the alternative trade movement, strengthen the competitive advantage of plantations and agribusiness, and further marginalize and exploit small farmers.
Comment by Nicholas — July 19, 2008 @ 4:02 pm