I've always loved a great espresso and get pretty excited about organic echinacea with honey, but it wasn't until I started volunteering my time while a student that I began to understand the far reaching consequences that such products can have.
Fair for who?
It is relatively well known that global trade has the potential to act as a powerful vehicle for economic growth. Despite this, it is also clear that there are tendencies of the complex system of globalised trade that can keep producers in poor countries disadvantaged and in poverty.
Coffee beans and our addiction to them provide a powerful example. With a glut of green beans sitting in warehouses around the world, recent years have seen the price at historic lows. As coffee is globally the second most traded commodity after crude oil, the result is that millions of families that were misled to depend on the crop in Africa, the Americas and Asia are currently facing severe economic hardship. Those in countries such as Ethiopia, for which 60% of export earnings are from green coffee, suffer enormously. While these families are struggling to live, the wealthiest countries subsidise their own agriculturalists an estimated US$20,000 per farmer each year.
One of the main aims of fairtrade labelling is to provide a means by which consumers can be certain that the producers of the products they are buying were paid a fair price, a starting point for making trade fair. In over twenty countries, including Australia, grass roots organisations working towards this goal have adopted the unified label of the Fairtrade Labelling Oranizations-International.
This label guarantees that products sold anywhere in the world conform to specific Fairtrade standards, providing real security and support to disadvantaged farmers and more importantly to their impoverished communities. Given the vast flows of money that comprise the global trade system, it is an inefficient but effective way of empowering disadvantaged communities.
The stable FLO price and the ongoing relationships that are forged between buyers and producer communities in the FLO system have allowed the establishment of hospitals, schools and adult education programs that continue to grow and improve the lives of the producer communites, despite unstable international commodity prices.
Ecological Sustainability
It takes roughly 20,000 litres of water to grow 1kg of coffee beans. The environmental impacts of a cup of coffee are profound.
The health and environmental benefits of organic agriculture are well known (or at least they should be!). Each of our blends contain a majority of certified organically grown coffee, with one of them containing 100% certified organic beans. Unlike Fairtrade labelling, however, no single international umbrella body exists for organic certification and standards can vary according the producer group.
For the growers of the beans we roast, certification is done by the European Union recognised Naturland, e. V., the Soil Association and in some cases the American the Organic Crop Improvement Association all of whose standards are publicly accessible.
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The internationally recognised Fairtrade labelling system which all our green beans are purchased through also enforces strict environmental standards. With the promise of a fair price, producers are able to implement sound environmental crop management, to switch to organic fertilisers, biological disease control methods and to adopt ecosystem friendly shade grown practices. Indeed, they are required to work towards these environmental goals in order to maintain their Fairtrade certification.
Several of the communities that grow the coffee we blend and roast, for example, are involved in reforesting important rainforest areas, such as the cooperatives in Costa Rica.
We are currently working on a sustainable alternative to our fossil fuel-legacy packaging and hope to have a better solution before we invest in more bags. While we work on a solution we encourage all our customers to maintain and retain their coffee pouches for future use. These are quality packages that will last for five or six purchases and the polyethylene can be recycled. For this reason, we offer discounts on future orders of 50c per bag returned to us in good condition.
Please come and visit us for a sample. We guarantee that you'll find the best thing about organic and Fairtrade certified teas and coffees is the quality.