make the best blend. Telling them that they can't put a Fair
Trade seal on their blends unless they use nothing but coffee
from co-ops is not, in Rice's view, a realistic approach.
"We have found time and again, over the last 14 years,
companies that were willing to do more Fair Trade—they were
eager to convert more of their products to Fair Trade—but
they weren't willing to allow us to dictate who they could put
in their blends," Rice says.
Rice's critics claim he is too concerned with increasing the
quantity of coffee certified as Fair Trade, at the expense of the
concept's integrity. Matt Early, co-founder of Just Coffee, a
roaster in Madison, Wis., says he stopped working with FTUSA
and other labeling organizations since 2004 because he felt they
were getting too far removed from small coffee farmers.
"We worked with Transfair [FTUSA's former name] for
a couple more years and came away with the feeling that
they really were not interested in the little guys who were
really trying to create change," Early says. "Instead, they
were interested in courting big companies who weren't at
all interested in creating this sort of new understanding and
relationship between farmers and consumers."
A QUESTION OF FAIRNESS
The biggest problem with extending Fair Trade to large
farms, FTUSA's critics say, is that such farms already hold a
Coffee buyers will have two fair trade certification
seals to choose from, following the divorce
between Fair Trade USA (left) and Fairtrade Labeling
Organizations International.
significant competitive advantage over small ones. Rodney
North, a spokesperson for Equal Exchange, an importing/
roasting/retailing co-operative based in West Bridgewater,
Mass., says that historically, coffee "plantations" have used
their volume and darker tactics, like worker intimidation, to
maintain the upper hand.
"The plantations were a part of, to use today's vernacular,
the one percent," North says. "The had the land, the political
connections, the financial connections. They had the
relationships with the banks and export houses and the big
brands and so on. And those advantages don't go away."
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