Specialty Coffee Retailer is a publication for owners, managers and employees of retail outlets that sell specialty coffee. Its scope includes best sales practices, supplies, business trends and anything else to assist the small coffee retailer.
Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/103518
Maximize the positive press from your feature in www.specialty-coffee.com insight for the coffee and tea trade REPRINTS G REEN I N G Y O U R C O F F E E H O U S E Maximize the marketing power of your feature. - business CH O CO L ATE F L AV O R I N G S www.specialty-coffee.com business DECEMBER 2012 insight for the coffee and tea trade EPRINT Give your feature a presence on the World Wide Web. CUSTOM PLAQUES Showcase your great press in a public area for all to admire. DOWN ON THE FARM How to help coffee farmers, and why cafés should care 001_cover_scr1212.indd 1 How fair BY PAN DE METRAKAKES W 11/27/2012 12:32:44 PM The Farm Direct model is emerging as an alternative for ensuring fair payment to coffee farmers. BY PAN DE METRAKAKES C APROCASSI, a Peruvian coffee cooperative, recently received a grant from Fair Trade USA. How best to benefit farmers is the central question of the Fair Trade dispute. hat's the fairest way to ensure Fair Trade? The Fair Trade concept is the oldest and bestestablished approach to making sure coffee farmers get a reasonable return. But the Fair Trade world was roiled last year when Fair Trade USA (FTUSA) split from its parent organization, Fairtrade Labeling Organizations International (FLO), based in Bonn, Germany. The divorce, which became effective at the beginning of this year, now means that coffee buyers—whether coffeehouse proprietors or simply consumers—now have two Fair Trade certifications to choose from. The split between FTUSA and FLO goes to the heart of what is, or should be, the mission of Fair Trade. Specifically, it's about what kinds of coffee farms and farmers should be included or excluded, based on their size. Both sides have advocates who have dedicated years to Fair Trade, are passionately committed to their respective points of view—and just as passionately convinced that the other side is wrong. The Fair Trade concept, at its most basic, involves simply paying a small premium for coffee and other Third World commodities, with the understanding that the extra money will go to the farmers. The split between FTUSA and FLO came about primarily over the issue of what kinds of coffee farms should be eligible for Fair Trade. The traditional Fair Trade model, which is still practiced by FLO, caters mostly to small farms organized into cooperatives. These co-ops decide collectively how to use the extra Fair Trade money for the betterment of their community. FTUSA believes that large farms that employ many workers should be eligible for protection under the Fair Trade umbrella—and so should small farmers who are not organized into co-ops. ESTATES OR PLANTATIONS? FTUSA, led by president and CEO Paul Rice, believes that including large coffee farms with many employees (which Rice refers to as "estates") is the only realistic way to grow the Fair Trade concept and keep it viable in the marketplace. FLO and other practitioners of the traditional Fair Trade model believe that extending it to large farms (which they prefer to call "plantations") will dilute the concept beyond all meaning. To date, FTUSA has taken what Rice calls "baby steps" in implementing the new model. Four new producers have joined so far, two estates and two "networks" of small holders. FTUSA's goal is to bring in about 20 more new producers over the next two years. Rice says he came to the decision to move away from the co-ops-only approach after years of observation, both before and after he helped found FTUSA in 1998, convinced him that it was too constricting. He claims that the traditional model excludes some 90 percent of the 30 million worldwide workers in the coffee sector. "I came to this work after 11 years of work in the field [in Nicaragua], where I worked on one failed development project after another," Rice says. "Fair Trade really tries to rethink that logic and create a sustainable business model." TOO RESTRICTIVE Rice's biggest objection to the co-ops-only approach is that it puts a large portion of global coffee production out of the reach of Fair Trade. This effect is exacerbated by the pervasiveness of blended coffee. Most roasters want as much flexibility as they can to use whatever coffee they think will offee farmers have been on the minds of American coffee drinkers even before Juan Valdez and his donkey strolled onto America's TV screens. Coffee is a product of the Third World, where farmers of all kinds have been chronically mistreated and underpaid. Socially conscious coffee drinkers—the kind who are especially likely to visit coffeehouses—care about that, which is the raison d'être of approaches like Fair Trade. The Fair Trade concept, long a subject of intense debate, has been roiled by last year's departure of Fair Trade USA from Fairtrade International. (See "How fair is fair trade?" on page 10.) Some roasters and coffeehouses are taking concern for coffee farmers to what they see as the next logical level: Building direct links between farm and cup. This concept, generally known as "Farm Direct," is based on relationships between individual farmers or farming towns and roasters—and beyond the roasters, the coffeehouses they supply. Under the Farm Direct model, not only do roasters commit to buying all or most of the crop from the targeted farmers; they seek to maximize payments to them by cutting out middlemen as much as possible. This means that the roasters, or their agents, do the exporting themselves at cost, along with the production tasks that precede it: depulping, washing, hauling, etc. DRAMATIC BENEFITS The benefits for farmers are dramatic, according to Farm Direct advocates like Ed Wethli, owner of Kiva Han Coffee, a roaster based in Cranberry Township, Pa. In a lecture at this year's SCAA Expo in Portland, Ore., Wethli claimed that Farm Direct can net coffee farmers as much as $1 a pound more than the Fair Trade price. "What [Farm Direct] really is, is going to smaller farmers and helping them, buying their coffee directly and taking it to the mill with them or for them," Wethli says. "Once we take it off their hands it becomes our responsibility. You've got to find a roaster that is willing to commit to that. There really aren't a lot of us out there doing this." 10 10-12_fair trade_scr1212.indd 10 de Direct benefit is fair trade? Questions of who should share in fair trade led to the divorce of Fair Trade USA from its global parent. si go ou ttle : T ea so RETS o., S l A SE C e e C ff Co In Salvadoran coffee farmer Nancy Majano Arenivar stands in front of the El Salvador "Origin Week" display at Ritual Roasters in San Francisco. Finding those roasters isn't as simple as looking for a seal on a package. There is no agency or organization that certifies coffee as "Farm Direct." Coffeehouse operators who are interested in Farm Direct coffee must seek out roasters who are following Farm Direct principles. The most basic requirement is, simply, a "story"—a narrative about the farmer or farmers involved, giving the nature and history of the relationship and its benefits to them. "When you do this Farm Direct coffee, you want to build a long-term relationship with these farmers," Wethli said in the SCAA lecture. "You don't want to just go in there once, buy their crop and then leave." AMAZON ANDES Kiva Han has developed such a relationship with the farmers of Cococho, Peru, a town 7,200 feet above sea level in the "Amazon Andes." It is 17.5 hours from the nearest airport, with the last five hours on a hazardous one-lane dirt road. The farmers there had been selling their crop to middlemen, often known as "coyotes," who often cheated them every way they could. The coyotes would weigh the coffee with scales that registered up to 20 percent short; they would use satellite Internet connections, which they knew the farmers didn't have, to take advantage of fluctuations in the commodity price, which Wethli says cheated the farmers by up to 50 percent. Now offering short-run reprints! Order 100 copies or less. 13 11/27/2012 5:55:06 PM 13-15_farm direct_scr1212.indd 13 11/27/2012 12:01:47 PM For custom reprints contact us today! Call (678) 292-6054 or email cnaughton@m2media360.com.