With all the coffee choices we have now, are coffee farmers making more money or expanding their markets like they could not 20 years ago? It doesn’t appear so. Oscar Abello writes about the pitfalls of Fair Trade certification and the clash between what professes to do and reality.
If Fair Trade certified coffee is intended to be sold at a fair price to give workers a fair wage, then why are farms larger than 10 acres allowed to be certified, when they can afford to pay their workers better than small farms.
When Aida Batlle she took over her family’s 38-acre farm in El Salvador in 2002, it was too large for fair-trade certification, even though Batlle claims to pay her workers three times what everyone else is paying, plus transportation and food. After winning El Salvador’s inaugural Cup of Excellence competition in 2003, Aida became something of a celebrity in the “Third Wave” movement of coffee, even getting her own profile in the New Yorker.
One of Batlle’s longest-running buyers is Counter Culture Coffee, founded in 1995 in Durham, N.C. Ten years ago, Counter Culture was still mostly a smaller regional roasting company, trying to get a market foothold by handing out samples in grocery stores. Customers would ask why one coffee from Nicaragua was certified fair-trade and this other one from El Salvador (the coffee from Batlle’s farm) wasn’t. In reality, Batlle’s workers were among the highest paid of all of Counter Culture’s suppliers.
“The idea that this was somehow unfair because there’s no certification on it, no seal, was just maddening,” says Counter Culture Kim Elena Ionescu.
Maybe certification is merely another way to pay bureaucrats for the privilege to say what they want us to say.
In other news, Dunkin Donuts now offers a coffee-flavored doughnut, which makes me ask why they didn’t have this before. Particularly since DD is known for their coffee, I assumed they already had a coffee-flavored doughnut, just as I would assume they zip up their pants. When you notice you point it out like a mistake, not a new idea.
Husband and I drink fresh ground Kona every day. Kona—as in one of the islands in Hawaii. American coffee. It’s delicious, and the only thing I feel guilty about is occasionally making a second pot all for myself.