Fair trade biz takes off

To see the global economy in action, you could fly to Indonesia and see the sweatshops and the cleared rainforests, or you could just stand in the unemployment line and talk to your downsized neighbors. Either is depressing, and you might feel like standing up to the big corporations—but you still have to buy stuff.

That’s why an international coalition of farmers, workers and nonprofit organizations created an alternative global economy in the Fair Trade products, environmentally safe products grown and made in Third-World family farms and distributed mainly by democratically-run co-ops. Fair Trade labeling organizations chose October as their official month to spread awareness of the movement in the United States. Appropriately, it is also Official Co-op Month; Fair Trade products have spread largely through the growing number of co-operatives.

Fair Trade Labeling Organizations International (FLO) certifies farm co-ops and distributors in 17 countries with the coveted Fair Trade label, as long as they abide by strict trading standards. Distributors, for example, must pay farmers an equitable price for crops; for example, $1.26 a pound for coffee instead of the average 25 to 30 cents per pound paid to coffee farmers in countries like Guatemala and Mexico.

FLO also regulates the quality of the product, and requires signed contracts between producer and buyer—small details that require little overhead for Fair Trade organizations, but ensure that all parties are fairly treated. Buyers must also pay a premium so that producers can invest in development of their villages, and provide “pre-financing,” or give a portion of their payment in advance.

According to Scott Patterson, director of the Minneapolis-based Peace Coffee, some Latin American villages have gone from making coffee for big conglomerates to selling to Fair Trade networks. Getting a fair price means that “communities are now building schools and health clinics with their coffee money,” he said.

“Fair trade is a system of trade based on accountability, respect, and transparency,” Patterson said. “At a concept level, it’s pretty simple. It means thinking about who grew the product, how they grew it, and how those people who grew our coffee are treated.”

The first crop widely grown by fair trade standards was coffee in the 1980s, with an estimated 500,000 farmers from 25 countries in Latin American, the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia. An increasing number of chocolate and banana farmers are also joining the fair trade movement, although coffee, of which the United States imports 2.72 billion pounds per year, still dominates.

“We’ve been in a coffee crisis, as far as pricing goes, for about three years,” Patterson said. Coffee is currently the world’s second most valuable traded commodity, with about 25 million farmers producing coffee worldwide, and fair trading practices are becoming acutely necessary.

The fair trade movement has grown hand-in-hand with the spread of co-operatives, of which there are nearly 500 in Minnesota and 90 in the Twin Cities alone.

“There’s a tradition of having co-ops in the Midwest,” says Margaret Lund, Executive Director of the North Country Cooperative Development Fund, a nonprofit that supports co-ops. “There are more concentrated here than in any other place in the U.S. In the past, there have been telephone co-ops, dairy co-ops … And they have a connection to the ‘new wave’ co-ops such as natural foods stores. Natural food co-ops are a very, very active market in the Twin Cities and Midwest.”

Co-ops are businesses “owned and controlled by the members, by the people who benefit from it,” Lund said, and include housing co-ops, natural foods co-ops and merchant co-ops, like the Mercado Central on East Lake Street.

The relationship between fair trade and co-op structures is mutually dependent: if a co-op in the Twin Cities wants to provide fair trade products to their consumers, they can easily form an alliance with a producer in a developing country. Sometimes the farmers, too, are co-ops — hundreds of coffee farmer co-ops right now are registered as Fair Trade producers, including Oaxaca, Mexico’s CEPCO coffee farmer co-op with its 16,000 members.

Tom Pierson, an advisor and member of several local co-operatives including Seward Café, attributes the limited use of fair trade in the United States to “the difference between instant gratification and investigative consumerism.” Pierson provides technical assistance to co-ops and has dealt directly with fair trade marketing efforts.
“A lot of marketing is geared toward consumerism—seeing a product, and instantly purchasing it,” Pierson said. “There’s no consciousness or awareness raised in terms of the product. That is the general mindset that we’re fighting in terms of marketing.”
Patterson, however, believes this attitude is slowly changing.

“We’ve seen a huge growth in consumer awareness,” he said. “More people are asking the question, ‘Where does this come from? Who grew it? Is it organic? Under what conditions is it grown?’ Coffee is a great fair trade item; people drink it every day. It has shown that the choices we make day-in and day-out can have a positive impact. My hope is it will establish enough of a base to continue that trend.”

To find Fair Trade vendors in the area, visit www.mnftc.uni.cc. To support local cooperative organizations this October, visit www.co-opmonth.org and www.mncooperate.org.