Fair Trade vs. Direct Trade, Pt. 3–Why Direct Trade?
(This is part three of a three-part series addressing the debate of Fair Trade vs. direct trade, their political ramifications, and why I prefer direct trade. Read Part 1 here, and Part 2 here.)
In Part 2 I discussed why I don’t think Fair Trade is the best option for getting the best beans at fair prices to everyone involved. But in fact, I didn’t even touch on my single biggest reservation about TransFair: It’s one company.
TransFair has spent years building the Fair Trade brand and getting people to associate their logo with social consciousness–but what happens if TransFair one day dissolves? Another nonprofit will have to start all the way over with a new logo, losing hundreds of thousands of dollars in marketing for years until people mentally latch on to it. Fair Trade has set itself up as the single lynchpin in the marketplace that defines fair practices in the coffee industry, but coffee is a gigantic global industry. A single nonprofit, no matter how big, can’t be everywhere at once and as a result many of the small and poor growers who really need the help end up falling through the cracks.
So there must be a better option, one that’s scalable and supports the two most important roles in the coffee chain: the small grower, and the specialty roaster. Direct trade is that option.
In direct trade, the roastery develops relationships with individual farms, cooperatives, and growing associations. The relationships largely develop in an “old-school” way; word of mouth, personal visits to the farm, and sitting down with the farmers and cupping the coffees themselves. Each roastery and farm must decide the terms of the working relationship, from working conditions, pesticide usage, and revenue distribution. In other words, you’ve got to do your homework, and that could understandably be considered a downside to direct trade.
The upside of course is that the roastery hand-picks the best of the best coffee varietals and can personally vouch for its quality and social consciousness all the way through the chain. In addition, direct trade is more flexible, so if an estate such as Selva Negra hires temporary labor during harvest months but pays them fairly, they’re not automatically excluded. It allows a wider variety of coffees from which to choose when the grower’s size or organizational structure isn’t an issue.
Ultimately direct trade allows social consciousness to work with the free market instead of trying ineffectually to grapple with or control it. Coffee consumers have already proven that they can and will vote with their dollars, which is the one thing Fair Trade has really gotten right. But direct trade allows everyone in the chain to vote with their dollars, and doesn’t require a single and financially-weighty worldwide watchdog agency to administrate it (and absorb money from small farmers while doing so).
Where can you get direct trade coffees? Direct trade is growing rapidly but is still a relatively new movement, so unfortunately you can’t expect to walk into just any shop and expect to find some; also, some regions of the world such as Ethiopia simply can’t offer direct trade coffees because the government controls the trade and auctions all the beans. Maybe the biggest stride was recently taken by Intelligentsia Coffee Roasters, a Chicago-based mid-sized roaster and wholesaler who recently took the step of deciding to offer only direct trade coffees. (I applaud that, but I find their recent trademarking of “Intelligentsia Direct Trade”–with the attendant implication that they somehow invented the direct trade model–unnecessary at best and somewhat sinister at worst.) More and more coffee shops are starting to advertise direct trade, and you can even find them online at places like Stumptown Roasters and RareCoffee.com. They’re often mixed in with Fair Trade coffees, so be sure to ask. Remember, with direct trade the growers get more of the profit than with Fair Trade, so be clear that it’s direct trade coffees you’re after.
Because of the constraints of the blog format, I’ve only really touched briefly on the differences between Fair Trade and direct trade. If you’d like to know more, here are some great resources:
- Reason Magazine: “Absolution in Your Cup” (thanks to Roger for this one)
- The Stranger: “Direct Challenge”
- Intelligentsia explains their direct trade model
- EthicalCoffee.net
Someone smarter than me will have to come up with a solution…
Nice article, and certainly food for thought!
While the idea of direct trade makes absolute sense, the problem really comes from consumer reluctance to be ‘brave’. ie. if a product has the FT marque on it, you don’t feel that you have to worry aboout whether this is a genuine or fake (FT) claim ie. it can’t be abused by corporate supermarkets.
How would you be able to give that same credibility to direct traded coffees? Also, FT encompasses many more products, each with different production requirements. Could a direct trade ‘label’ be applied to all these too?
The sadest bit thoough is that FT products, though a growing market, amount to a tiny percentage (some 0.5%) of products sold! Consumers are slow learners…
Best regards
Christian
PS: Do you run the same FT trademark in the US: http://www.fairtrade.org.uk ?