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TRADE A GOOD DEAL?
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kS unlight washes through an open garage door, illuminat
ing stacks of coarse burlap bags full of green coffee
beans, and the tin roof of the building that houses
Jittery Joe's Coffee Roasting Company on East Broad
Street is baking in the late August heat. Something here is entirely
new, however. Although they don't look or smell or even neces
sarily taste differently from the high-quality Arabica elsewhere in
the warehouse, the 150-pound bags of Colombian coffee
piled up on one pallet mark a conscious shift in market
dynamics. This is Jittery Joe's roaster Charlie Mustard's
first shipment of Fair Trade coffee.
Recently, Fair Trade has become a commercial buzz
word for sympathetic coffee buyers. It's an attempt
through special certification to make up for market
failures that exploit underpaid growers. The price pre
mium on Fair Trade coffee is intended to ensure that
the producers get their share and priority investment is
made in local infrastructure, education and even credit
institutions for developing areas of the globe. In theory,
Fair Trade puts Third World producers on par with First
World consumers through the economic beneficence of
the latter: in a sentence, it's a noble effort by us not to
rip them off.
Although its good intentions are hard to dispute, is
Fair Trade itself a good thing? The Economist, for one,
says no: a Dec. 7, 2006 article argues that Fair Trade
increases supply by setting a false pricing threshold,
and the increased supply in turn drives down the overall
market price of coffee. Charlie Mustard has been in the
coffee business a long time, and it's not an accident that this is
his first purchase of Fair Trade. But as a businessman, his initial
objections are more pragmatic: In order for a roaster to buy Fair
Trade, he or she has to make a substantial monetary commitment
up front. To contract with a co-op of small. Fair Trade farmers, an
initial investment of $5,000, 10,000 pounds and 10 percent of
gross profits is not uncommon. For a modest roaster like Jittery
Joe's, Mustard says, 'That's a big risk to take."
"I can't just buy three bags of coffee to try out," Mustard says.
He worries that the whole process—particularly the tandem of co
ops and the certifying agencies—has become almost a parasitic
entity, where the lion's share of money goes back into maintaining
the machine. At its very worst, Fair Trade operates like an absurd
and mulish bureaucracy, and the trickle-down often never makes it
past the middlemen to the farmers.
Mustard has procured 1500 pounds at a decent price from
Balzac Brothers importers in Charleston, SC. "We'll see what it
does," he says, feeling confident he can move it within the year.
Eventually, Mustard wants to get beyond Fair Trade. He envi
sions a system with more directness and visibility. Tm going to
buy it from a farm," he says; he's been discussing with represen
tatives from the University of Georgia the possibility of working
directly with growers in Costa Rica or Rwanda. He wants
to display pictures of the farms and the farmers on the
walls. Then, he hopes, his consumers can feel the real
impact of conscientious capitalism.
BEYOND FA III THAI) 15
"Fair Trade did a lot to bring the plight of the farmer
into the foreground so that newer models like Direct
Trade could emerge," Ben Myers says, "but models build
off models; things develop. [Fair Trade is] kind of like
being into VCRs right now." Myers runs lOOOfaces Coffee,
a local micro-roaster trying to move beyond the imper
sonal reductionism of producer/ consumer and develop
direct relationships with farmers.
"Fair Trade is a good marketing ploy," Myers contin
ues. "It creates a fictional value of something only be
cause of the label. But it never takes into account qual
ity." In other words, Fair Trade coffee is like any other
bag, only it targets liberal-minded, price-insensitive
consumers with a murky promise of results.
For Myers, Fair Trade is a misguided way to help farmers. It
reinforces the greedy chain of agents between the qrower and the
consumer. When coffee moves from the grower to the co-op to the
purchaser to the exporter to the importer to the Fair Trade label-
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