Fair Trade Coffee Beans – do you really know it?

When we talk about Fair Trade coffee beans, as consumers, the first thing that comes to our mind is it is more expansive, about $2 more expansive than the usual coffee beans.

The concept of Fair Trade is to help poor farmers, prevent them from poverty.  I have to admit that the idea is good, but the outcome is not that good.

Firstly,  it does not only takes time to negotiate the price for fair trade coffee beans that has to be paid to the farmers, but the negotiation has to be done very often like 2 or 3 years according to the economy, when this cannot be done on time, the coffee price can reach even lower just like what happened during 1990-1992.

Secondly, the reason that coffee beans are cheap is they are overproduced, fair trade creates an artificial price that encourages more production of coffee. This perpetuates the root problem which is oversupply. By artificially raising prices, it just breaks the balance on supply relative to demand, so not good for economy in the long run.

However, for consumers, Fair Trade coffee is a good choice because most of fair trade coffee beans are organic or shade grown coffee beans, you have to know that fair trade does NOT mean organic or shade grown, but it offers an extra premium for organic production. As part of the certification, the farmers are taught environment and coffee friendly methods of fertilization and pest control. They’re also taught about growing practices that benefit native vegetation and wildlife.

When it comes to purchasing fair trade beans, what you need to know is that when you see the “Fair Trade Certified” label on one line of a company’s products, that does NOT mean that all of their products are Fair Trade Certified, only products that bear the label are purchased through Fair Trade criteria.

If you need more research data, you can visit the following site, it has  a list of reports and papers written by the Fairtrade Foundation.

http://www.fairtrade.org.uk/resource/reports_and_briefing_papers.aspx

You can find a list of 100% Fair Trade Companies here.

http://www.globalexchange.org/campaigns/fairtrade/coffee/retailers.html

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