Humanizing Fair

Obtaining coffee for your French Press is no simple matter. The international coffee trade business – especially the specialty coffee trade – is a complex and delicate web of dialogue that, if done to the satisfaction of everyone involved, has the potential to really contribute to making the world a better place.  That is what I like to think of as one of the foundational ideas behind fair trade (either with a capital F and T, or lower-case f and t).

I know that many of the readers of this blog buy and drink fairtrade certified coffee, because we have a sense that it more directly benefits disadvantaged coffee farmers by offering them a stable market and higher prices.  As consumers, we read the stories on the package of how fair trade changed someone’s life, and we see the photos of families in far-off countries.  But the hardest thing for us is to go beyond that, to actually stop and ask – is that all?  Is there more behind that story?  To listen to the people who produce the coffee, cocoa, or tea that we drink every morning, to hear that the reasons fair trade is necessary in the first place are complex and require solutions that extend far beyond higher and more stable prices, although those are definitely important.

I don’t want to write the usual fair trade monologue of how you should be aware of where your food come from – I don’t believe that knowing alone goes far enough; and anyway, there is enough information already on the internet or on your supermarket shelf that you can access if you felt inclined to do so.  What I want to write about here is how your efforts to educate yourself about what you consume is part of a complex network of efforts, a grand movement of people, places, and organizations you cannot even imagine; your efforts to change how you consume are instrumental within this movement, and they support a myriad of other pieces of the puzzle of global food trade.  Fair trade, then, as a product certification and as a social movement, is a way to connect all of these often-disparate efforts, facilitate dialogue and communication, and to streamline efforts to goals in common.

In my work in Nicaragua in 2002-2005, and in my work with United Students for Fair Trade in the last three years, I always tried to explore these complex realities and relationships of fairtrade, and also explore how to use them to connect different people, different groups who could collaborate.  What I loved about the fairtrade world is that it never stopped with coffee or with any product.  I witnessed time and time again how coffee, or its fairtrade-certified status, would bring two random people together in a room at a conference, or in shaded coffee field on a mountain, and out of that meeting would come spectacular ideas, and real, constructive collaborations that continued to blossom long after the visit was over.  It always struck me that if we could talk about ourselves as more than coffee farmers, more than coffee drinkers, even as we acknowledged that coffee is what brought us together, we could really help more people to relate to fair trade and its vision of making trade relations more human and more sustainable.

Farmers are not just farmers – they are businessmen, community leaders and organizers, and have countless other roles. Cooperatives become the motors of rural development in places where the government either cannot or will not support development.  In Northern Nicaragua, that meant cooperatives taking on roles coordinating projects such as literacy-by-radio campaigns, economic diversification through agroecotourism development, scholarships for children of cooperative members.  In Uganda, it means a cooperative being instrumental in creating and building interfaith peace and trust in a community where distrust and conflict goes back a long time.  Companies are not only buyers of product – they are bridges, resources, advocates, educators of coffee-drinkers back home.  The point is that once we start thinking about each other as more than participants in the value-chain, we have to move away from questions like “does fairtrade work or not?” and towards a vision of collaboration in which we see it as a critical tool that contributes to the goals that we have in common with farmers or businesses, and makes us imagine more creatively how we can all collaborate…

Okay, enough of my ranting. I will write later this week about Peace Kawomera’s recent visit from Ben Corey-Moran from Thanksgiving Coffee and Ben Schmerler from TransfairUSA – It was an exciting and fun visit!

Also, speaking of collaboration (and great coffee!), please support Peace Kawomera cooperative by purchasing their coffee! (My birthday is coming up, so do it for me!).  Go to the link on the right sidebar of this blog, or go directly to http://store.thanksgivingcoffee.com/product_info?products_id=29

Mwebere! (Thanks! In Luganda)