How can inequalities in the coffee industry be improved

Precipitation is more volatile, drought and flooding are both more widespread, and rising temperatures threaten coffee farmers, regardless of location. Unpredictable climates can have a direct impact on crop quality.

Alex tells me that specialty coffee is particularly at risk due to climate change. But as farmers move up the mountainsides, there is less and less land available for coffee. In general, coffee farming has a negative impact on biodiversity, but some methods are more destructive than others. Coffee farms with shade trees are best for birds and other wildlife populations.

But the overwhelming majority of coffee is produced on monoculture farms, which reduces biodiversity. The World Economic Forum reports that intensive sun-grown coffee farms can have pollination and pest problems, which increases reliance on pesticides and further perpetuates ecological degradation.

Coffee consumers also have a role to play. Both disposable cups and single-use coffee pods are difficult to recycle and create waste volume with every cup. There are some small moves toward more sustainable options, including the proposal of a latte levy and cornstarch pods that are commercially compostable.

Ripe coffee cherries. So what can we do to reduce our environmental impact and ensure the economic and social wellbeing of farming communities?

Daniele highlights how people, planet, and profit are interlinked. It is possible to get much closer to sustainability. We simply need the courage to make it a priority that is part of and not separate from profit. Coffee cupping in Guatemala. Alex tells me that it is possible for the coffee industry to meet the triple bottom line. He highlights some of the work that the Rainforest Alliance is doing. These are the forests where Arabica coffee originated, and they are threatened by conversion and deforestation.

As a result, the local communities are taking a soft touch on the environment, diversifying their income with honey and other crops, and ultimately gaining a better income from some of the most spectacular and important coffees in the world. It may seem overwhelming to consider all of the effects of the coffee industry.

It has huge impacts on communities around the world and the health of the planet. But there is hope. When you buy your coffee, consider its origin and farming method. Think about the most sustainable way to prepare it. And consider whether you can support the projects of an organization that encourages sustainability. Enjoyed this? To its credit, Fair Trade USA has played a significant role in getting American consumers to pay more attention to the economic plight of poor coffee growers.

Although Fair Trade coffee still accounts for only a small fraction of overall coffee sales, the market for Fair Trade coffee has grown markedly over the last decade, and purchases of Fair Trade coffee have helped improve the lives of many small growers. Despite these achievements, the system by which Fair Trade USA hopes to achieve its ends is seriously flawed, limiting both its market potential and the benefits it provides growers and workers.

Among the concerns are that the premiums paid by consumers are not going directly to farmers, the quality of Fair Trade coffee is uneven, and the model is technologically outdated.

This article will examine why, over the past 20 years, Fair Trade coffee has evolved from an economic and social justice movement to largely a marketing model for ethical consumerism—and why the model persists regardless of its limitations.

The idea of fair trade has been around since people first started exchanging goods with one another. The history of trade has shown, however, that exchange has not always been fair. The mercantile system that dominated Western Europe from the 16th to the late 18th century was a nationalistic system intended to enrich the state. Under these circumstances, trade was anything but fair.

Local workers often were compelled through force—slavery or indentured servitude—to work long hours under terrible conditions.

In the s and s, nongovernmental and religious organizations, such as Ten Thousand Villages and SERRV International, attempted to create supply chains that were fair to producers, mostly creators of handicrafts. In the s, the fair trade movement began to take shape, along with the criticism that industrialized countries and multinational corporations were using their power for further enrichment to the detriment of poorer counties and producers, particularly of agricultural products like coffee.

Adding to these perceived economic imbalances is the cyclical nature of the coffee business. As an agricultural product that is sensitive to growing conditions and temperature fluctuations, coffee is subject to exaggerated boom-bust cycles.

Booms occur when farm output is low, causing price increases due to limited supply; bust cycles occur when there is a bumper crop, causing price declines due to large supply. Price stabilization is an objective commonly sought by less-developed countries through commodity agreements. Thus the International Commodity Agreement ICA evolved as a means to stabilize the chronic price fluctuations and endemic instability of the coffee industry.

The first of these agreements arose in the s to provide stability during wartime, when the European markets were unavailable to Latin American producers.

After the war, a boom in coffee demand made renewal of the agreement unnecessary. But during the late s, down cycles threatened economies once again. The ICA essentially was little more than a cartel agreement between the member countries coffee producers to restrict output during bust periods to maintain higher prices, storing the surplus beans to sell later when output was low.

Because the US government was concerned about the spread of communism in Latin America, it supported the cartel by enforcing import restrictions. In , however, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the waning of communist influence, the United States lost interest in supporting the agreement and withdrew.

Without US enforcement, the cartel fell prey to rampant cheating on the part of its members and eventually dissolved. Attempts have since been made to resurrect the cartel—but though it exists in name, it remains largely ineffective. Recognizing the dire circumstances confronting farmers during the late s, when the price of coffee once again plunged, fair trade activists formulated a system whereby farmers could obtain access to international markets and reasonable reward for their labor.

In a coalition of those economic justice activists created the first fair trade certification initiative in the Netherlands, called Max Havelaar, after a fictional Dutch character who opposed the exploitation of coffee farmers by Dutch colonialists in the East Indies.

The organization created a label for products that met certain wage standards. Other similar organizations arose within Europe, eventually merging in to create FLO, based in Bonn, Germany, which today sets the Fair Trade-certification standards and serves to inspect and certify the producer organizations.

Why do we care about fairly traded coffee? One reason is the importance of coffee to the economies of the countries in which the crop is grown. Coffee is the second most valuable commodity exported from developing countries, petroleum being the first. The Specialty Coffee Association of America reports that approximately 23 million people in the United States drink specialty or gourmet coffee daily.

The primary way in by which FLO and Fair Trade USA attempt to alleviate poverty and jump-start economic development among coffee growers is a mechanism called a price floor, a limit on how low a price can be charged for a product. Commodity coffee is broken into grades, but within each grade the coffee is standardized. This means that beans from one batch are assumed to be identical to those in any other batch.

It is a standardized product. Specialty coffee, on the other hand, is sold because of its distinctive flavor characteristics. This figure is significantly higher for coffee grown in full-sun versus that grown under shade cover. Put more simply, industrialized countries use the ecological carrying capacity of periphery countries to offset the environmental impact of their own consumption. Large statistical studies have confirmed this.

Sociologist James Rice found that, among lower- and lower-middle-income countries, those with higher proportions of trade export to Northern countries had lower domestic resource consumption net of other factors.

Placing coffee at the center of highly unequal trade relationships between North and South, these studies show that commodity coffee production is rife with multiple forms of socioecological exploitation. Several movements have sprung up to address many of these inequities by raising awareness and offering a more equitable alternative. Fair trade certification provides economic stability for farmers by providing them a base price for their coffee, requiring unionization or cooperative business structures and encouraging them to adopt more sustainable farming practices.

A newer movement, direct trade , has buyers send representatives directly to coffee farms to observe their practices and develop long-term trading relationships.