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Le café inéquitable
Fair-trade coffee producers often end up poorer
Coffee is one of our guilty pleasures, and not only because of the calories that can be packed into a double latte. Many of us feel guilty that our pleasure is coming at the expense of the Third World coffee farmer, so much so that we gladly pay more for “fair-trade” coffee, which certifies that farmers receive more revenue for their crop.
Saturday, on World Fair Trade Day, we have something else to feel guilty about. That fair-trade cup of coffee we savour may not only fail to ease the lot of poor farmers, it may actually help to impoverish them, according to a study out recently from Germany’s University of Hohenheim.
Some believe that certified coffee is superior in some way. It is not. The small-scale farms whose local ecologies produce distinctive, niche coffee beans can’t operate on a scale that would justify official certification. As the German study notes, “Certified coffees have distinct production and marketing systems with different associated costs than the conventional system.”