Maybe sometime Siel can do some postings on Fair Trade sugar as its SUCH a complicated story, full of trade barriers, subsidies, cold war politics and much more. Also, unlike coffee or cocoa the US produces 85% of the sugar it consumes, but that’s in part dependent upon the afore-mentioned trade barriers. It’s a case where FREE trade might actually be more FAIR, too, but I’m still learning, so look into it yourself.

Also, the FT sugar scene offers an interesting twist as the current FT leader is also the nation’s largest sugar corporation, Imperial Sugar, aka parent co. of Wholesome Sweetners, who have converted almost all their organic sugar to FT organic sugar.

For the record at Equal Exchange we’ve always used FT organic sugar in our cocoa mix, chocolates, and sell it separately, too.

Yes, it comes across as a disincentive when TF does this kind of thing. We can express our feelings to TF until we are blue in the face and our argument is quickly marginalized as “elitist” or “entrenched” Many of my peers have simply given up and accepted the new arrangement.

Interestingly, when we write a contract with a cooperative many times we can choose if the lot will be fair trade certified or not. The price paid to the cooperative doesn’t change, but if we select a FT option the person who handles our importing has to pay a fee to transfair, then we pay a fee to transfair.

Some of the roasters under the new fee structre have opted to seperate their lots and buy the coffees that will end up in non-FT blends without a fair trade contract. The co-op actually nets more money because in addition to the price the roasters agree to pay the cooperative the .10 premium they used to pay transfair. If the importer agrees to do the same thing then the co-op can add .05-.10 more to the selling price of the coffee. The net effect is a larger sum paid to the cooperative. Rather than send the dimes to oakland they would rather put it in the hands of the farmers. In a sense it is an act of protest.

Sadly, Transfair isn’t putting much stock in what many of the smaller outfits want. Can you blame them? Afterall, SBUX is the single largest buyer of FT coffee followed by GMCR and Equal Exchange. When 3 outfits account for just past 50% of the annual FT purchases it isn’t hard to see who has the ear of Paul Rice.

As I don’t run a coffee company, I can’t crunch numbers for this — but it does certainly seem like a less-than-ideal deal for companies that have made the choice (for various reasons) not to get 100% of their coffee fair trade certified.

I really don’t like the fact that this sort of policy can provide a disincentive for coffee roasters to use fair trade coffees as components of their coffee blends.

What bothers me most — and what interests me about your post — is the seeming opacity of TFUSA in this process — i.e. not soliciting the opinions of current licensees before announcing the change, and also not letting current licensees know clearly that they could stick to their original contracts…

This opacity clearly needs to change, and I do hope that companies like yours will speak up and push and prod TFUSA in a better direction –

We’re on that list and there is a growing tension between mission based fair trade roasters and the mainstreaming that is taking place. To a small degree elitism is part of the issue, however there are some much more compelling reasons for the growing disdain among the ranks of “mission based” roasters:

In 3Q 2004 Transfair abruptly changed the system for reporting and licensing fees.

From 1999-2004 Roasters paid a .10 fee for every pound that was ROASTED AND SOLD with a fair trade logo.

Without speaking a word about the upcoming changes during the specialty coffee conference in April 2004, in early may 2004 transfair asked roasters to resign a contract that would alter the fee structure and require a .10 payment for every pound of fair trade coffee PURCHASED. The fee structure offered incentives based on % of fair trade coffee, prompt payment, and most significantly a discount for volume. In order to receive any discount the roaster must have a third-party audit of their purchasing.

My company buys around 75% of our coffee with fair trade oversight, always at least .35 a pound above the $1.41 floor price for organic coffee. The remaining 25% is sourced via direct relationships and the very transparent juried competition auction format. We label less than 50% of our coffees with the transfair seals. Many of our best-selling blends contain between 50-80% fair trade coffees and we are not interested in calling them fair trade offerings.

When we crunched the numbers it was clear that our licensing fees would increase significantly. We decided to remain on our contract from 1999 with transfair, (which was an option that was not offered up front by Transfair, we learned this from another roaster just before we signed the new deal.)

We pointed this out to transfair and they simply did not believe we would pay more based on our previous purchases and future contracts. Once their accounting department reached the same conclusion the arm-twisting to sign a new contract was tabled.

We are happy to pay a licensing fee to transfair for the coffee we label as fair trade. I am not interested in paying a tribute to transfair for coffee that is not marketed with their brand image on the package.

I am very glad to see fair trade on the shelves of the largest grocery stores in the country. It is a positive step. It does herald the entry of the largest roasters to the fair trade movement.

Small roasters were the first to embrace transfair. It was a venture with alot of hope but very little to offer in the early days. 7 years later the incentive to join transfair is reflected in the market growth figures for the coffee industry. Nestle cannot sit on the sidelines, nor can proctor and gamble, and watch their market share decline. Now, the tables have turned. The largest roasters need transfair while many mission based roasters are finding more rewarding relationships outside of the fair trade context.

I haven’t courted the mainstream market. I won’t be selling our coffee to Wal Mart anytime soon. I am happy that fair trade has arrived in the mainstream. I simply ask this: the next time you look for a coffee source it from a local or regional roaster and look for a company that can tell you where their coffee came from, fair trade or otherwise!

On the other hand, I’ve seen a lotta readers who start out by making anonymous comments then move on to making public and personally invested comments. Not to mention all the lurkers (and to lurkers — that’s quite ok) who don’t comment at all for a long, long time.

For many, commenting on blogs is a frightening, intimidating thing — after all, blogs are forever :P Many people are not used to airing their thoughts on a public, permanently avaliable forum.

And that’s fine. After all, writing’s a vulnerable act. I encourage everyone to come out, but won’t hold it against you if you dont.

Of course, yes — your level of self-revelation does directly affect how seriously others can take your comments. And if you’re gonna make inflammatory or contentious comments, I do hope that you’ll give us the courtesy of letting us know who you are. Otherwise, you could get labelled as a troll!

From clicking on my profile in the page above and doing a very small amount of detective work you would find that my name is Justin Purser, and that I am the coffee buyer for a fair trade organisation in New Zealand named Trade Aid Importers. Now let’s ask ourselves…. having added a link that essentially identifies myself professionally would I be more, or less, likely to engage in slander?

Here is some proof for our reader.

Fair trade chocolate without fair trade sugar is due to be released into the Australasian market soon with the blessing of the FLO mark. This can be confirmed by FTAANZ, the Australasian licensing agent for FLO, at nz at fta dot org dot nz

I agree that any claims within the FLO/non-FLO fair trade debate should be well backed up. I’d suggest that use of real names during conversations would make this more likely.

I didn’t think Justin’s remarks were too off the mark, though they were perhaps too harsh at times. There IS a fear that the entry of multinationals will cause a further watering down of fair trade standards in the future.

We certainly have already seen decisions made that many fair trade stakeholders have questioned, from the entry of Nestle — a widely hated company — into the fair trade roster in the UK, to large tea plantations being permitted into the system (arguably prematurely). There was also a banana deal that TFUSA tried to put through without consulting NGOs and other stakeholders — Luckily, that deal was effectively sunk by the ensuing outrage. TFUSA does have a very top down structure, and the org really has had a history of failing to bring everyone to the table before pushing through a decision.

This is also the first time that publicly traded companies have made up such a huge part of the fair trade market. Starbucks and Green Mountain alone make up almost 40% of the US fair trade market. And while there are lotsa great people at TFUSA, there is certainly the sense that TFUSA’s letting companies in too hastily, at the expense of keeping fair trade standards strong.

Meaning: Fair trade certification at the moment really has its problems. But I still feel that certification is important, and that activists and mission-based companies should try and push to fix those problems instead of abandoning it…

And btw — this post was about Rink’s opinion — an important one, but not necessarily the opinion of Equal Exchange as a whole. Many within Equal Exchange also feel fair trade certification is important — I’ll write more about some of these other people’s thoughts.

I’d also like to note that this post came out of a summit that Equal Exchange threw specifically to bring lots of people to the table — something that shows Equal’s keenly aware that fair trade is bigger than all of us.

Do people in the movement know how FLO sets standards? Do they actually try to educate themselves on how standards are set? Do they understand that it’s a laborious and throrough multi-stakeholder process that includes fairly powerful producer groups?

People in the movement who like to bash FLO and TransFair also seem to be the ones most resistant to any growth or dynamics of change. If fair trade is trying to transform the nature of trade from the global south to the global north, shouldn’t it evolve? You’re not going to empower people in the developing world by forcing them to only adopt a co-op model that was developed in Central America. What if that model doesn’t work well in East Africa or Asia? Should farmers/farmerworkers who would benefit from a different co-op or estate model be shut out of the system because Equal Exchange or USFT or Oxfam America says so? While USFT and Oxfam have no motives to make a profit, EE, while a co-op, is not a non-profit and has clear business interests. Should they be allowed to make decisions that change the competitive landscape (by being allowed to determine who does and who doesn’t get to sell fair trade certified products?) You would think that these organizations would realize the fair trade is bigger than all of us.