What You Should Know About Being Fair
In the coffee industry, Fair Trade is considered to be an extremely important asset because coffee is one of the few internationally traded products that are still largely produced by peasant farmers on small plots of land. In fact, according to an article by Karla Utting-Chamorro (Does Fair Trade Make a Difference? The Case of Small Coffee Producers in Nicaragua) in the scholarly journal “Development in Practice,” the coffee bean industry has “almost 70 percent of production coming from producers who farm less than ten acres of land."
Supporters of Fair Trade coffee believe that they contribute to not only bettering the farmers’ lives but to helping to protect the environments these farmers live in.
Better Lives
The Fair Trade coffee movement has set price floor of $1.26 per pound of coffee produced and must keep the price at least $0.10 higher than the general market price
Through contracts made with buyers, low interest credits, and the $1.26 price floor, coffee growers are able to receive real, stable wages and have a good standard of living
Along with personal betterment, the rates from Fair Trade organizations help to fund the communities or cooperatives of the growers. With funding to their local infrastructures coffee communities and cooperatives can have better schools, health facilities, stores, and more.
Healthier Environment
Fair Trade coffee works to save environments that the coffee communities grow their coffee beans in
Some non-Fair Trade farmers may strip extra land to make way for alternative crops to try and subsidize their lack of income. Whether this helps generate more money is questionable, but it does harms the environment. By stripping the land of native plant life, growers run a high risk of destroying many animals’ homes and migration paths, depleting the nutrients from the soil, and causing erosion.
Fair Trade requires that the coffee farming communities and cooperatives it supports practice environmental sustainability, meaning they use ecologically friendly methods to produce their coffee beans. This standard of environmental protection is called “Fair Trade Certified.”
“Fair Trade Certified ensures that farmers obey internationally-monitored environmental standards, while empowering farmers and farm workers with financial incentives and resources for organic conversion, reforestation, water conservation and environmental education.”
(www.transfairusa.org)
There are many requirements that farmers have to abide by for certification. These include things such as a list of chemicals prohibited from use, becoming properly educated on waste management, and no gathering materials from protected areas.
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| Fair Trade Coffee Research Paper | |
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