Is fair trade working? Daniel Jaffee takes a well-aimed shot at answering this question in his new book, Brewing Justice: Fair Trade Coffee, Sustainability, and Survival. Of course, the question’s necessarily broad, and quickly branches out to a myriad of new questions: What are the quantifiable benefits for fair trade to coffee farmers? What are the difficulties and obstacles? What are the challenges facing the fair trade movement in the “first world” countries?
Brewing Justice starts off with a brief but detailed history of the fair trade movement, then quickly takes us to Oaxaca, Mexico, to look at what sort of effect fair trade has had on the coffee farmers there. Sure, we often hear generalized, anecdotal stories of how fair trade has benefited coffee farmers and the regions they live in. But Brewing Justice takes on the more difficult task of trying to quantify the benefits of fair trade in a way that goes beyond anecdotal stories to present us with a picture of fair trade that’s more complete and statistically sound.
The answer? Well, it’s complicated. What becomes very clear is the immense difficulty of statistically quantifying the benefits of fair trade in an area where some farmers have joined a co-op while others have stayed out, but pretty much everyone’s related and labor’s often shared in a neighborly-family sort of way.
Add to that the fact that farmers themselves often conflate the benefits of fair trade and organic certifications (organic certification’s what compels farmers to undertake different farming practices, but fair trade certification’s what guarantees a higher price for organic coffee), plus many many other labor, price, and benefit issues, and a precise, statistical, dollars-and-cents value of fair trade certification to the individual farmer becomes near impossible to determine.
Still, the stats pretty compellingly show that fair trade does, in general, bring monetary and other benefits to coffee farmers that participate in it. In light of this, Brewing Justice then turns to the fair trade movement in the “developed” world, dissecting the challenges there. We read about the die hard fair trade groups that really want an end to capitalism as we know it, the middle-ground activists that desperately want to bring big corporations into the fair trade movement, and the big corps that want to water down fair trade to do as little as possible while getting maximum PR benefits.
So what to do? Well, here’s where the book gets a bit nebulous. In a chapter titled “Strengthening Fair Trade,” Daniel lists a number of imperatives, including “Protect fair trade against dilution and co-optation” and “Clarify the goals of fair trade.” Daniel’s take’s that to forge a unified movement, all the different groups in fair trade need to agree on a philosophy and strategy to work towards.
While I agree a unified philosophy and strategy would be nice, I have no idea how that might be achieved. For one thing, I’m not even sure that a unified philosophy is necessary to pursue a unified (or at least more unified than currently) strategy. We can have different philosophies, but we can still choose to work together, in my opinion.
For another, I’m not sure how a unified strategy can really be achieved in a movement whose certifying organization in the US — TransFair USA — has said it’s not a multistakeholder organization. TFUSA’ll listen to other stakeholders, but it’s free to pursue its own, lonely stragegy if it so chooses. Yet Daniel argues we need to “push the movement’s key institutions, particularly national and international certifiers, to reform the system.” I’m a little afraid that this strategy sort of puts the movement at the mercy of a certifying org that doesn’t see itself as beholden to the other stakeholders in the movement.
Then again, activists work to push even big corporations all the time — and even get small concessions out of them from time to time. And in fact, TFUSA’s already come out in support of one of Daniel’s recommendations — adjusting fair trade minimum prices.
On a larger scale, Daniel emphasizes that it doesn’t end with just expanding the fair trade movement as we know it: “The difficult truth is this: we cannot rely on the market to provide economic and social justice. Nonstate regulation such as fair trade is useful and important, but alone it is insufficient.” Buying fair trade coffee, in short, is not an end all; it should instead act for us as an entrypoint for engaging with some of the larger issues of global trade and justice.
I first met Daniel at the United Students for Fair Trade convergence; he agreed to be on a panel I organized. At that time, the book was still a draft and Dan was a grad student. Now I’m holding a copy of Brewing Justice; its back cover says Daniel’s Assistant Professor of Sociology at Michgan State University.
In comparison: I was a grad student with a blog then, and I’m a grad student with a blog now. Well. At least I don’t live in Michigan. I ran by the beach today, and it was beautiful :P
Now, now, Siel. That wasn’t nice to take a pot shot at Michigan that way.
As for “unified strategies”, I think diverse groups of people and organizations can and often do – sort of – move in one direction, even if there is neither a formal agreement, or even shared goals. Rather, all the actors (individuals or organizations) are picking up cues & incentives (or disincentives) from the people and environment around them. For ex. it could work like this: roasters offering too little (or no) FT coffee see sales their sales slip, while roasters who add FT coffees do better. Customers hear about FT from friends and the media and start to buy some (or more) FT coffee. The media – in its frequent herd mentality – writes more & more about FT in response to FT buzz in the blogosphere. Farmers who had hestitated to join FT co-ops change their mind as their neighbors do a little better w/each passing year. FT farmer co-ops, with an increasing market share, and with an increasing number of roasters who are dependent upon FT sales, find that they have increased negotiating power. And so on. I think this is in fact what I’ve seen over the last 11 years I’ve been in this movement.
And, yes, definitely Fair Trade is just a starting point. At Equal Exchange we often talk about this, and try to remind people that not only can you/should you “vote your dollars”, but also vote you votes. FT helps. Organic ag helps. But farmers (and US workers, too) are up against more than just low prices & low wages. For example, we’d like people to get more involved in setting right the imbalances in the US economy too. Just as farmers benefit from the economic democratization brought by co-ops, more US workers, and others, could be enjoying such control and benefits. We tried to articulate this last year in the 20 year Vision we staked out for ourselves. One can see it at:
http://www.equalexchange.com/our-co-op
We hope people will check it out and think if they’d like to see such a vision realized and what it could mean for them personally.
Comment by Rodney North — May 11, 2007 @ 10:22 pm