I recently spent two weeks at Nueva Alianza, Guatemala, volunteering on a cooperative coffee and macadamia nut farm, and have come to the conclusion that Fair Trade Coffee is not the knight in shining armour portrayed to us java guzzlers here in the industrialized world. Fair Trade Coffee is a mixed bag.
In order to be Fair Trade Certified, coffee producers must pay 2000 Euros (roughly $2,970 Canadian) to purchase a coffee license, and must meet certain standards set by Fairtrade Labelling Organisations International, or FLO. This is a good thing, since standards ensure quality control and avoid abuse and corruption, but are only valuable if they better the lives of the people they are meant to benefit.
The average Guatemalan coffee picker earns less than $1,000 Canadian per year. For poor communities such as Nueva Alianza, a Fair Trade certification costs nearly triple the average income, simply beyond their means. On farms with relatively low annual production, the increased price Fair Trade Coffee commands is unlikely to actually cover the annual expense the community pays for their Fair Trade Licence. It’s a bit of a vicious circle.
Coffee pickers in Nueva Alianza receive 25 quetzales (about $3.25 Canadian) per 100 pounds of coffee “cherries” picked. (The cherries are the red, ripe fruits of the coffee plant, each of which contains two coffee beans.) That is the equivalent of about CA$3.40 per 100-pound bag. Though Nueva Alianza is seeking outside assistance to gain Fair Trade certification, right now the cooperative can’t afford to operate within the system.
You may not know how painstaking processing coffee is. Beans have four outer layers that must be removed, and take a great deal of time and labour power to husk. Therefore, a 100-lb bag of cherries will actually only yield about 20-30 pounds of beans - once refined, close to a seventy per cent loss. Roasting reduces the yield still more, to only 11.5 pounds. You don’t need to be a business mogul to understand what a liability that is. That, combined with a very unstable coffee market that fluctuates considerably, makes it a wonder that coffee producers make any money at all. Unfortunately—as is often the case—economics have no effect on the fixed costs involved in producing a quality product or bringing coffee to world markets.
So, should we turn our backs on Fair Trade Coffee? Whatever its faults, my opinion is it’s imperative to continue to buy Fair Trade Coffee – the positives outweigh the negatives. Our dollars have a voice and it is important for us to build consumer demand for Fair Trade products, including everything from coffee to cotton to chocolate to bananas. In a city as rich as Calgary, there is really no excuse for doing otherwise.
Why? At the moment, buying Fair Trade may not immediately equate to increased wages for the coffee pickers themselves, but the producers do benefit. In Nueva Alianza’s case, because the money will be reinvested in the community, it will benefit the workers at large. When these reinvestments allow the farmers to produce a higher-quality crop with a correspondingly higher price, it will equate to higher wages for the pickers. The war fought over coffee will end as soon as enough cognisant consumers look at the plight of coffee producers and take a stand.
I have a thought every time I belly up to the counter, and that is this: if the coffee pickers are spending hours on a humid, sweltering hillside, braving coral snakes and fire ants, breaking their backs for three dollars and forty cents to pick a hundred-pound bag of cherries, surely I can spend at least that to help ensure they are getting a humane wage for their product? Any way you slice it, under the conventional system the pickers and the harvesters draw the short end of the stick. While Fair Trade may be imperfect, its shortcomings are nothing compared to the swindle committed by regular trade coffee companies.
So, the good news is that there are plenty of independent coffee-mongers right here in Calgary: The Good Earth Café, for example, is a lovely place which serves 100% Shade Grown and 100% Organic coffee. All of their blends contain significant proportions of Fair Trade coffee.
Coffee shops such as Urban Bean, Weeds Café and Kaffa Coffee House also carry blends from The Cochrane Coffee Traders, who roast its coffee right in Cochrane.
If you buy coffee for your home, Ten Thousand Villages carries an assortment of Fair Trade and Organic coffees, as does Community Natural Foods. Saltspring Coffee Company and Kicking Horse coffee are great Organic Fair Trade Canadian Coffee companies available at Community Foods.
If, however, you would prefer to support coffee producers in Guatemala, you can find out about buying Fair Trade from Café Conciencia (Coffee with a Conscience.) A full 100% of proceeds from coffee sales go directly back to the worker-owned communities such as Nueva Alianza that grow, process, roast and package it. That way, the communities are earning over five times as much per pound of coffee as they would on the conventional market, and over three times as much as in the mainstream Fair Trade market. This is a true grassroots organization with prices that can’t be beat. One pound of coffee costs $10 US and that INCLUDES shipping and handling.
Bottoms up.
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