Coffee has been the darling of the Fair Trade Movement for the past decade. In the United States coffee is the second largest import, petroleum is first, and the most popular fair trade product on the U.S. market.


Coffee is a convenient product for fair trade because of the growing gourmet coffee market, and the relative ease in creating direct relationships between coffee roasters and coffee growers (unlike other products which must go through many different steps of assembly and refinement). In the past few years the fair trade coffee market has undergone radical changes as corporate giants, Starbucks, Dunkin Donuts, and Nestle have introduced their own lines of fair trade certified coffee.

To better understand the growth and change of the Fair Trade Movement, I interviewed Matt Earley, a veteran of the fair trade coffee movement.

1. How are you involved with the Fair Trade/what is your job?
I am a worker and co-owner of a fair trade coffee roasting business, meaning that we only roast fair trade coffee. We are also members of Cooperative Coffees, an importing co-op of fair trade coffee beans made up of 18 different coffee roasters with fair trade as their core mission. On top of this we also think of ourselves as fair trade educators and promoters, we try to speak about our vision of fair trade whenever and wherever we can.

Ever since prices collapsed in 1989, coffee has been priced at about $1/lb on Wallstreet, which means farmers get 0.30-0.50/lb. In 2000 TransFair paid $1.26/lb, significantly increasing farmer profits. Stats from the North American Council on Latin America Report 2000.

2. How was Just Coffee started?
Just Coffee came about when my partner Mike Moon and I began to work with Zapatista coffee farmers from the Autonomous Municipality of Santa Catarina in Chiapas. I started going to Chiapas right after the Acteal Massacre in 1997¹. Some folks here, in Madison, Wisconsin started a relationship with the communities of Santa Catarina in 1999. Most of the people we met there were coffee farmers. They were beginning to form a producer co-op that they would eventually call Yachil Xolobal Chulchan. They asked us to help them get into fair markets with their coffee, which seemed do-able at the outset. However, without FLO [the Fair Trade Labeling Organization] certification or organic certification, no roasters or importers in the States wanted to buy their coffee. To make a long story short, they finally convinced us to buy their coffee ourselves and start roasting.

3. How is Just Coffee different from traditional coffee companies?
We are different from other companies in that we are 100% fair trade, it is what we do. We don’t use fair trade as simply a marketing opportunity, we see it as a way to change power relations in the world. These days almost all social relationships are couched in economic language, the “free” market is somehow equated with democracy, the dollar with a vote. I believe that capitalism has become so firmly entrenched in our global culture that we have to address economic inequality before all else. Fair trade, when it lives up to its potential, is revolutionary in this sense. Just Coffee totally embraces politics in our business and, departing from the capitalist model where most businesses try to hide their beliefs, we are way out front with ours. To me consumption is totally political. To not see consumption as political is a political choice. To me, our business is an experiment to see if fair trade can really work as a business philosophy and practice.

4. Specifically how do you help the coffee growers you buy from?
Much of FT has been reduced to a price. A price which incidentally has not changed in 16 years and is no longer a fair price. We pay above the FT minimum price (Co-op Coffees members are now paying $1.50 a pound for organic/FT and $1.30 for conventional FT) and we are waiting for our grower partners to come back to us with analysis from each co-op to tell us what a “real” fair price would look like.

Beyond the price, Co-op Coffees is creating an official voice for our producer partners in our decision-making structure. We do not know what this will look like yet, but hopefully our grower-partners will get back to us soon on how they would like to see that work.

I guess most of all I feel like we have real relationships with our partners. Members of Co-op Coffees visit the co-ops every year, sometimes more than once, to really understand their situations. We also host growers up here and try to get them familiar with our communities and who is serving their beans. In this way we really get to know each other as partners.

I would like to say that we have seen all of the grower communities transformed, and in some there is a noticeable difference compared to pre-FT days, but unfortunately this is largely not the case. What I can say is that we are working to strengthen the model and to help producers get to where they want to be and that it will be a very long process. But, we are in it together.

5. Has Just Coffee ever considered selling other Fair Trade products, like bananas or t-shirts?
We purchased T-shirts made in a women’s co-op in Nica and cacao from a Zapatista co-op last year. We are very open to expanding our line. Santa Anita has the tastiest organic bananas in the world! We try to help co-ops diversify production as much as we can, not just doing cash crops for the export market, but also doing subsistence and local market stuff as well. I think that in the end growing coffee as a sole cash generator in a losing proposition for these communities. Even for those that have accessed fair trade.

6. Do you consider Fair Trade a ‘consumer’ movement?
I don’t know. I mean, it has that component. I was a consumer that went to the source and realized how screwed up things were and then decided to take action. I think that there is always a cyclical relationship between consumer and industry. Someone has to start the conversation with consumers,: consumers demand something so an industry sees an opportunity and feels pressure and responds. Then, if it works right, consumers ratchet things up even higher with the added prodding of industry misfits like us.

TransFairUSA spent over 2/3rds of their 2002 program expenses on marketing.

7. Has the market for Fair Trade coffee grown in the past couple of years? To what do you attribute the growth?
There has been a huge explosion of growth. Part of this has been TransFair’s excellent marketing skills. And I think people in the US are searching for a way to do right by less advantaged countries as they watch our government and big corporations plunder them.

8. TransFair USA advertises itself as the “only consumer guarantee that farmers in developing nations are being paid a fair price for their crops”. What has been your experience with TransFair certification?
From my experience, a roaster applies to become a licensee. Then every quarter the roaster voluntarily submits the amount of FT coffee sold to consumers and pays the fee to use the TFUSA label based on a per pound price. I have never spoken to a roaster who has been audited by TFUSA. My opinion is that their system is ripe for abuse and that it is based on a self-reporting "trust us" system. To contrast this, TF Canada audits each of its roasters every year. I think that TFUSA is a brilliant marketing organization (I believe that 70-80% of their annual budget is spent on marketing), but I am not as thrilled with their ability to certify roasters' products.

9. At the fair trade conference there was a rift between the larger Fair Trade organizations (like TransFair USA) and smaller, 100% Fair Trade Organizations. Do you see the Fair Trade community dividing? What would this mean for the growth of fair trade?
I see it as already divided. TFUSA has done a nice job driving growth of FT in the US. As this has happened a need for a "go-to" fair trade organization was created, a need to deal with the media, the industry, a public face. TFUSA filled the power vacuum that was created by a fast growing market. They became at once the promoter, certifier, and gatekeeper of the US FT community. Over time they have developed their own definition of FT and their own vision of the future, they did this in the name of the entire US FT movement, but without much discussion or strategizing with other FT organizations. In their vision FT is situated within the rest of the capitalist market where sheer size and the power of capital trump the smaller, more committed, and "less efficient". The bottom line is that TransFair wants to see Fair Trade brought into the mainstream while there are many of us who want to see the mainstream brought into Fair Trade. This difference is profound, it is whether to create a little niche market where companies can do a bit of token good for marketing purposes or to progress toward creating an alternative trade system that changes the logic of commerce to first consider the welfare of producers before gross profits. These are not the same things.

TFUSA has taken a political position in how FT should progress, but they lack the chutzpah to be up front about their stance, instead constantly stating that they don't do politics, that they certify products and not companies. But by refusing to officially recognize and appreciate the practical differences between a 100% FT company like us and a low percentage huge predatory roaster like Starbucks, they are taking the teeth out of fair trade.

However, I do think that we could work together on some fronts if TFUSA would open up to some constructive criticism and do some strategizing with us. TFUSA plays an important role in trying to get these big companies to take a first step. What they need to do, in my opinion, is work with some of us mission-based folks to strengthen their system and to construct mechanisms (official and unofficial) to get these big companies to increase their commitment to fair trade over time. This would take a good faith effort by all of us and an agreement to really listen to each other. So far we feel TFUSA has not been willing to do this.

10. Why did Just Coffee remove the TransFair certification from their coffee?
We left TFUSA because we do not agree with their vision or strategy in growing the FT market. In my opinion they have a strategy that consists of growth at all costs, embracing big corporations and plantations into their system. In order to achieve this growth they have alienated many of their most ardent supporters in favor of taking on big trans-nationals and predatory national chains that are attempting to weaken the standards of FT. Letting these foxes into the henhouse, they have put nothing in place to keep them honest or to make them ratchet up their percentage of commitment, letting them use the label without asking them to change their overall practices. In doing this they have become financially dependent on these companies and have lost their ability to hold them to a high standard. In order to insulate themselves against criticism they have become a very closed and rather secretive organization. Their board is appointed by their CEO and they have no NGO, 100% Fair Trade roasters, or producer voices in their decision-making process.

We have a problem with this, and consequently we do not want to carry their label on our products. If a grower organization acted with this lack of transparency, FLO would decertify them.

11. Why do you think Starbucks and Nestle have introduced Fair Trade certified products?
Because, a) there is a market for them and they can make money selling with the TF label, and b) activists have applied pressure.

12. Do you think the new corporate fair trade coffee offered by Starbucks, Nestle, etc will take away from Just Coffee's consumer base?
This is a bit of a concern because Starbucks and even local conventional roasters that dabble in FT can undercut us on price because they also buy beans for "sweatshop" prices. They can actually lose a little on their FT, but underprice the 100%ers and take market share based on price and the fact that their coffee carries the TFUSA label. In Madison this is a bigger problem for us with the local roasters that we compete against. The competition has actually become pretty ugly on some fronts.

The good news is that, especially for us in Madison, our primary base is solid in the knowledge that they are supporting a different model. So, although we might lose a few stragglers to the conventional roasters, people are pretty excited about us locally, which is maybe 60% of our business.




¹ On December 22, 1997 Mexican government paramilitaries surrounded a church and shot 21 women, 15 children and 9 men who were attending mass in Acteal, Chiapas Mexico.




Interview conducted by Sarah Miller, a recent graduate of the University of Wisconsin, Madison..

To read another Global Envision article about Fair Trade Coffee, see Coffee Price Drop Hurts Farmers.



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