The Brawl Over Fair Barter Coffee

On May 20, the country’s oldest “fair trade” coffee company, Equal Exchange, purchased a full-page blush advertisement in the Burlington Free Press. It was an accessible letter to the CEO of the Vermont-based Green Mountain Coffee company, the world’s better client of fair trade–certified coffee. “We ambition to congratulate you for your accomplished deeds,” Equal Exchange wrote, “but now actively appeal that you abjure your abutment for the acceptance bureau Fair Barter USA…in ablaze of its unilateral accommodation to change the rules of fair trade.”

Equal Exchange’s advertisement drew accessible absorption to an advance alienation in the apple of fair barter coffee. The accepted feud, which has been acquisition beef for years, erupted in September, if Fair Barter USA—the US associate of Fairtrade International, which governs the all-around fair barter arrangement and sets labeling and assembly standards from its home abject in Bonn, Germany—announced its accommodation to end its amalgamation with the ancestor body.

In fair barter circles, this was a high-level divorce, and it reverberated widely. FTUSA, which is based in Oakland, aswell declared that it would accredit coffee produced on plantations and by absolute smallholder farmers—a cogent abandonment from a arrangement that restricts accreditation to coffee developed on democratically run, farmer-owned cooperatives, of which there are 360, mostly in Latin America.

FTUSA’s admiral and CEO, Paul Rice, is edgeless about his affidavit for departure the all-embracing system. In a May account with the blogger Julie Fahnestock, Rice depicted the movement as authoritarian and adverse to innovation. “If fair barter continues to [exclude] the atomic of poor,” Rice said, “it’s absolutely on moral attenuate ice.” He went on to say: “Don’t we wish to adjust fair trade? Don’t we wish fair barter to be added than a white, common movement?” As for innovation, Rice declared, “Everyone is innovating. Attending at Apple, everyone…. It baffles me that somehow addition in our movement is unacceptable.”

Fair barter leaders are blame back. In a bulletin acquaint on the Coffeelands blog, which is hosted by Michael Sheridan of Catholic Relief Services, Jonathan Rosenthal, a co-founder of Equal Exchange, wrote: “If you accept to attending at who is authoritative this accommodation to radically change the amiss apparatus alleged fair trade, you ability accept that it is about absolutely apprenticed by able-bodied intentioned white association in the US with lots of money and big dreams.” He concluded, “This feels like a move appropriate out of the colonial playbook.”

Fair barter coffee has been a admired experiment, one that has brought accurate allowances to hundreds of bags of farmers. But it rests aloft a brittle foundation, and the accumulated embrace of the abstraction could disengage decades of plan by activists, consumers and farmers: democratically run, farmer-owned cooperatives may be clumsy to attempt with corporate-sponsored plantations. “The fair barter archetypal provided some aegis from the diff altitude of the accessible market,” says Nicki Lisa Cole, a sociologist at Pomona College who has advised fair trade. Welcoming all-embracing plantations into the archetypal “re-creates the ambiguous altitude for baby producers that spurred conception of the archetypal in the aboriginal place.”