They have taken a bold step, and let it be known that they do so with the ultimate respect of their peers in the roasting business.

Rather than reducing their efforts to some form of self-service please consider the positive impact this company has on coffee farmers and specialty coffee roasters the world over. I am grateful that Intelligentsia is willing to use their resources for innovation and I believe it will inspire many “mission based” roasters to undertake projects that invoke a similar spirit of equality and social justice.

Please let me add my general applause, and my own thanks for the considerable time and thought you gave to your post. I think you just brought a lot of people much closer to understanding the many, many considerations involved in being a socially responsible member of the coffee trade today.

I hope you’ll indulge me in adding just a few thoughts of my own…

What FLO, Transfair USA and indeed the entire system of Fair Trade certification have brought to the table is laudable in its own right. It’s no small task to establish universally recognized and certifiable standards for the trade of *anything*, much less a product that is so varied and nuanced as coffee. The marketing power of the Fair Trade Certified label is clearly proving itself if by no other measure than by those who staunchly advocate for it.

Fair Trade has proven an effective tool to better ensure essential quality of life standards for growers through price supports and directed efforts in coffee growing communities; however, its reach is limited. Not all farm models qualify for certification. Not all cooperatives are within the geopolitical or geographic reach of Fair Trade certifiers. Fair Trade is, in this way, arguably “unfair” for the grower on the *other* side of the mountain, or the cooperative in a nation-state that cannot wear the Fair Trade label because of a compulsory system of trade already established by politics.

At its best, Fair Trade acts not only as a certifying agent (with a recognizable “seal of approval”) but it also acts as a proxy of sorts for the coffee roaster’s buyer of greens. Fair Trade certifiers are the “feet on the ground” at origin for roasters of most every stripe, shape and size, as the vast majority of coffee roasters (those that Geoff might call “entry-level” specialty roasters) may have neither the resources, the experience, nor the inclination to get into the farm field themselves.

Having a proxy is good… but having your *own* feet on the ground is better… much as a babysitter is rather a pale substitute for good ol’ Mom. A direct relationship between buyer and grower clears a lot of hurdles. It’s a boon to general communication about cup quality, flavor characteristics, and expectations for processing methods and standards of quality. When the buyer is at the coop, he or she has the opportunity to identify small problems before they become big ones… say, by recognizing that a better drying patio would really help cup quality, or that there’s a real problem in the community’s medical services that could be eliminated altogether with a bit of direct aid. Farm-direct relationships do more than nurture coffee, they nurture people, too.

Finally, there’s the important question of quality. Fair Trade makes no provision for quality, whatsoever. While it’s not unusual for a buyer to pay a price-premium for coffee that cups above a nominal level of quality, neither is it required (thus the very high percentage of contracts at $1.26 and $1.41 that Geoff references.) Mind you, that’s simply at “entry-level” specialty grades.

The Fair Trade model is *altogether* inadequate to the task of super-premium beans… what Geoff calls boutique coffees, and what we at Green Mountain call Special Reserve coffees. And at one level that’s okay… it’s simply not what Fair Trade is built for. However, when the popular consumer consensus is distilled to “Fair Trade = Good,” then the inverse — when we’re talking about premium beans for which the farmer received a price roughly equal to fifty times the “C” — well then, the inverse is just absurd. ;)

I guess what I’m trying to say is that not only is a farm-direct relationship not only *okay*, but it can be much better than *any* proxied relationship, provided it’s one that’s built on trust, transparency and a spirit of goodwill. Moreover, sometimes farm-direct is the *only* viable way to get great coffee to a grateful world… and a greater share of the profits where they belong… in the farmer’s pocket.