Fair Trade and Ethical Sourcing
There is so much information about different certifications for your bags of coffee, you might not know where to start when making your selections. Names like Fair Trade, Rainforest Alliance, and Organic, often sound familiar to us, but we don’t always know what makes these certifications valuable, and how they impact farmers and consumers alike. We hope to shine a little bit of light on specifically fair-trade coffee, and what it means to source coffee ethically.
Certifications like Organic, Fair Trade, and Rainforest Alliance all tell us different things about the way a coffee is grown, purchased, or the labor involved in its production. Organic coffee refers to coffee that has been grown without the use of chemical fertilizers or pesticides. Rainforest Alliance coffee is certified coffee that has been grown under certain environmental conditions. Particularly, the farms that hold these certifications protect the ecosystems they’re in with responsible agricultural practices.
What Is Fair Trade Coffee?
Fair Trade International is a certifying non-profit that handles the standards for Fair Trade certification. It is a certification that farmers pay to guarantee minimum purchasing prices for their benefit. This ensures fair living wages for their laborers, and the farmers themselves. This is common in the coffee industry and exists for other goods such as mangoes, sugar, and even soccer balls. It’s often the case where large corporations source green, unroasted coffee from small farms at unfair margins. Small farmers often find themselves having to sell their coffee at low rates based on market fluctuations and standards. This created a need for Fair Trade Certifications.
When Did Fair Trade Begin?
The Fair Trade concept began in the 1980's amidst a period of widespread globalization in market economies. More goods were moving from place to place, such as from third-world products to first-world markets. This process was (and still is) cheaper than sourcing the same product at a local market. It wasn’t new by any means, but it had seen more growth than ever throughout history.
Somewhere in the middle of all that, the Fair Trade Certification was born, seeking to get living wages paid for small, independent coffee farmers.
Benefits For Fair Trade Coffee Farmers
Farms that earned the Fair Trade certification became eligible to join co-ops who were part of large multinational organizations. These co-ops provided services for the farms, including soil analysis, education, and most important: a market for the farms to sell their coffee.
These co-ops also take part in social action in the sponsored farm’s country, building roads, hospitals, schools, and creating sources of fresh water. The criteria to earn fair trade certification is as follows:
-
Fair pay for farmers
-
Farming practices employed are environmentally sustainable
-
Direct trading with the farmers in place of a middleman
-
Acceptable living conditions for the workers onsite
So as long as a farm meets these criteria, they’re eligible for a Fair Trade label which earns them a more reasonable living wage, keeps them accountable for better practices, and helps their coffee sell stateside with the added Fair Trade incentive.
Fair Trade vs Ethical Sourcing
Next you might ask, “so if there’s not a Fair Trade label, was it sourced unethically?” The short answer is no! We mentioned earlier that Fair Trade exists for one group: small farms who can’t reach the crowded market, currently saturated by corporate coffee.
However, there exists many other buying and farming strategies to ethically source coffee while bypassing the certification process. This is often much more accessible to farmers than working with Fair Trade International to achieve a certification.
Direct Trade Coffee Sourcing
One of these strategies is Direct Trade, a process in which the buyer purchases from the farm itself, instead of working with importers. This empowers small farms to set their own price and cuts out fees that must be paid out to the importers, allowing them higher profit margins.
Specialty Coffee
What makes this a little more complicated is the factor of the quality of a coffee. A lot of the need for Fair Trade coffee is specific to the commodity coffee market. These are lower quality coffees produced in high quantities, sold at a low price per pound. These are the farms that are actively seeking Fair Trade certification for living wages. Specialty coffee scores much higher on quality scales than these coffees do, and sit it a different tier of pricing. Farmers will be able to negotiate high prices with importers that accurately reflect the quality of the crop they’ve produced, without having to buy into the Fair Trade program, or worry about the certification process. Since the quality and practice of these coffees is already ideal, they don’t need the Fair Trade label to help them out.
Unfortunately, these coffees (non-Fair Trade, but still ethically sourced) sit on shelves without a label or name tag. They’re often a much higher quality (because of their elevated methods which drive a higher price), but other than that, there’s no clear-cut way to point them out. This is where it becomes Lucky Goat’s job to highlight the quality of a coffee and the care that went into selecting it.
Green Coffee Sourcing
At Lucky Goat, we take great care to select our coffees. Read more about our process, here. We meticulously research the origin, the farmer, and as much of their practices as we can before bringing it to our roastery in Tallahassee. Just like you, we love coffee with a good story, and we are always seeking to support farmers doing good things in their craft. In our single origins lineup, you can review each of the pages to learn more about the farms and amazing farmers that brought each of our coffees to life.
Lucky Goat & Fair Trade Coffee
Lucky Goat is actively working on gaining a Fair Trade Certification. Just like the farmers, the roasters/manufacturers of Fair Trade crops must go through a rigorous certification process. Once we get this certification, we will be able to begin labeling some of our coffees as Fair Trade. It’s important to note though, that all of the coffees in our cafes are graded as “
specialty coffee”. This grade ensures that farmers have negotiating power, and maintain good agricultural practices to bring the highest quality products to us.
The biggest take-away we hope you gather is that there’s a lot of good work in the coffee community. There’s also a lot of work to be done which is why it’s important for all of us to invest our time and money into coffees that are sourced well, that employ high quality practices of ethics and sustainability. Lucky Goat is just the place to do that.
