Back in July, at Equal Exchange’s summit, I was lucky enough to get to hear firsthand the thoughts of Rink Dickinson, co-exec-director and one of the founders of Equal Exchange, and Doug Dirks, a biggie at Ten Thousand Villages, about fair trade certification.

Both Rink and Doug, at that time, seemed rather unconcerned about working on strengthening fair trade certification, which they saw as having gotten way too watered down.

My question was — what about us consumers? How’re we supposed to know who to support?

I’m not saying the label’s an end-all. I mean, obviously, at this point, I know I like what Equal Exchange and Ten Thousand Villages and other uber fair trade, mission-based companies are doing. Even if they left the certification system, I know I could trust these people.

But — what about consumers coming to fair trade later? If the Equal Exchanges of the world leave the certification system and do their own thing, how will consumers be able to tell the difference between those programs, and lesser programs like Starbucks’ CAFE practices?

It’s already time-consuming research to figure out the differences between greenwashing companies and truly fair trade companies. And to make things worse, big corps like Starbucks have a helluva lotta marketing power and money that smaller fair trade companies do not.

Doug’s response was basically that the truth would come out eventually — that, in lieu of a certification program, you’d have newspaper articles once in a while showing the great work that companies like Ten Thousand Villages are doing.

This expectation, I think, is way way idealistic — unrealistic, even. Sure, yes, Equal Exchange and Ten Thousand Villages get some good press sometimes. But big corps get like 10 times that amount!

This expectation also shows a bizarre — and in my opinion, misplaced — trust in the mainstream media. TIME, for example, pretty much equated the work Equal Exchange does to what Starbucks does. And I’ve already given Fortune some crap for writing about fair trade without actually doing research into finding out what fair trade is exactly, beyond Starbucks’ press releases.

It doesn’t end there — Starbucks recently got a glowing article in a trade pub called Food Processing Magazine for its Rwanda Blue Bourbon coffee. The article talks a lot about fair trade and how Starbucks goes over and beyond it — without ever mentioning that the coffee in question isn’t fair trade certified, though I believe the co-ops in question here are at least being paid well. This piece was written by the people at Understanding & Insight Group, a “business, product, and strategy development firm” that boasts such stellar (sarcasm) clients as Nestle and P&G — which makes me wonder if Starbucks also pays these people for their “journalism.”

And the Starbucks media machine’s hard at work promoting Starbucks’ self-created CAFE practices over and above fair trade certification. The mermaid’s efforts appear to be working — A Reuters article earlier this month was headlined “Starbucks sees strong growth for own “fair” coffee.”

Yes, the piece says some pretty things about CAFE practices — though to Reuters’ credit, the article points out that some Bolivian farmers could be getting a raw deal through these CAFE practices; these farmers inked a long-term deal with Starbucks while coffee prices were low, and now could be stuck selling their stuff for below market costs. In contrast, under the fair trade certification system, farmer co-ops always receive above C market prices –

I’m still thinking about these issues — More later –

Update: 10/29/06: Equal Exchange has put up a nice summary of what happened at the summit.

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