Fair Trade Coffee: A Broken System?
I’m talking ‘bout the man in the middle
The coffee fair trade system is broken. If we truly care about the quality of the product, the livelihood of the farmers and the whereabouts of our coffee expenditure, we better start asking and answering some very important questions…
Your morning brew. Your mid-afternoon espresso. Your slowly filtered, drip-based, Brazilian roasted Flat White. No matter how you drink it, your coffee is personal and every coffee drinker has their own take, their own favourite roast and even their own favourite coffee spot (in the worn out armchair). Even people who ‘don’t really drink coffee’ have their favourite type, after all, coffee is the most traded commodity in the world — and that’s including oil.
You see, it’s really about time we started looking into how we actually get our coffee. I mean really look. Yes, we’ve all learnt to accept that the Fair Trade badge is an environmental seal of approval but how ‘fair’ is fair trade? On the back of your average pack of supermarket ground coffee — the type you might use for french press, cafitiere or stove top — you’ll see a small green frog, depicting the Rainforest Alliance.
Beneath the logo you’ll read, ‘We work to improve livelihoods, protect landscapes…’ etc etc which all sounds very appealing but between the cracks, there’s uncertainty. What exactly does work towards actually mean? How much of our hard-earned cash actually reaches the farmer? Why are there multiple charitable organisations?
Before we answer these questions, lets rewind. Why should we care? Why should we actually care if the coffee is fair trade in the first place? We should care because this is real livelihood. Real people. Real farmers.
If that doesn’t strike a chord, consider coffee as an industry in need of protection. The farmers control the quality and if their produce isn’t sustainable, or more specifically celebrated, the product will only decline.
You love your coffee, so start really loving your coffee and spare a thought to those who really provide us with that caffeine kick. It’s 2018 and we’re still discussing fair trade but the fact of the matter is, with the current system, it’s impossible to achieve truly fair trade.
So, back to those questions…
We can’t know how much of our coffee spend actually goes to the farmer, nobody can, not even fair trade and that’s the problem. In attempt to cure the problem, Fair Trade have only added fuel to the flame, they are essentially a middle man between farmer and consumer in the same way a processor, or roaster is. A middle-man has financial expectations, no matter their situation or purpose.
There are plenty of schemes out there trying to address this, take Vava Coffee , a truly valiant effort in bringing around honest fair trade coffee but the problem is, there still no there. They say they can offer ‘premium prices’ to the farmers, but that’s a clever marketing way of saying, we’ll offer them more than anyone else. That still won’t register as fair.
So, is there a solution? There certainly is but first I must come clean. The title of this article is slightly misleading, or more specifically, not revealing enough. Fair Trade coffee doesn’t exist because of the system and currently, there’s nobody out there who can resolve the root of the cause.
In a capitalistic industry, the farmer is shunted to the bottom and despite the efforts of reducing a middle man, by interfering with a charitable incentive — you are still acting as a middle man.
So, it’s simple, the middle man goes. Completely.
How? (If you’ve made it this far, get ready for the good stuff, the ristretto of the espresso)
Real fair trade has be exactly that, a trade. A trade for cold hard cash, for cold hard coffee and nothing in-between. Look out for the Cofe Project, that’s Cofe — Coffee minus the Farmer Exploitation, a blockchain startup establishing a direct relationship between farmer and customer.
In the simplest form, you pay the farmer out of your own pocket. No charities, no vague labels, no profits for Cofe, a simple trade, like a good old fashioned playground swapsie.
Check out the Cofe Project at https://www.cofe-project.com/
Peace X