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One pleasure that makes you overly guilty is coffee and it is not because of the heavy calorie content in that double chocolate espresso, but because this leisure may come at the cost of a Third World coffee farmer.
Instead of soothing the poor farmers, the fair-trade cup of coffee actually distresses them further, states a recent study conducted at University of Hohenheim based in Germany.
The study followed hundreds of Nicarguan coffee farmers over the last 10 years. Researchers point out that farmers who cultivate for the fair-trade market are below the poverty line compared to the farmers who produce coffee for conventional markets.
The coffee cultivated by these farmers is organic by default but still they are unable to get the premium price of certified coffee just because they cannot pay the up front fees which the certification council demands to fly down and check their operations. This leads most coffee drinkers to assume their coffee is inferior when actually there is no difference at all.
(This raises an important issue, when shopping for “certified” or “organic” food and beverages like coffee. It’s important not to just assume higher prices mean better quality and to see what actually constitutes the high price for that brew in your coffee cup holder. You might be surprised that the high price isn’t really worth it.)
Also, to be qualified as fair-trade producers and obtain higher prices for their coffee, these Third World farmers must join co-operatives. In some Third World societies, farmers willingly accept the compromises of a communal venture. But in some other patriarchal African societies where the small coffee farm is the family business, joining co-operatives indicates a loss of self-respect.
Few folks think that certified coffee is distinct in a large manner. However it is not, the reality is that the small-scale farms whose local environments produce unique specialty coffee beans cannot operate on a level that justify authorized certification.
Certified coffee and ordinary coffee are both produced in the same farms using the same process. The fair-trade certified farmers also cannot distinguish between the fair-trade and conventional coffee; the higher-ups make that decision, but it’s important to ask how are they doing it?
The fair-trade councils also restrict the supply of coffee that can be labeled as certified because the rate of fair-trade coffee should always be high according to them. Thus, much to the dissatisfaction of the certified farmer, most of his fair-trade certified crop is traded as uncertified conventional coffee.
In the end, the fair-trade farmer is the clown and the joke is on the customer, but this well-planned price-fixing coffee game goes on until consumers demand something be done about it.
