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Walking down the supermarket aisle in search of coffee, I have this warm inner glow. If I choose a pack that boasts the Fair Trade logo, or that of any other third-party certifying agency, I’ll be doing good just by paying a little more for something that I am going to buy anyway. The extra I pay will find its way to the poor farmers who grow the coffee, and together enlightened coffee drinkers can make their lives better. But it seems I’m at least somewhat mistaken. Certified coffee is certainly better than nothing, but it isn’t doing as much good as I fondly imagine. And the price premium I pay could be doing a lot more.
In this episode I hear about coffee that’s more ethical than fair, and about some of the ways in which Fair Trade falls short.
Notes
- The Acteal massacre that prompted Chris Treter to get into coffee is a horrific story that continues to reverberate. Matt Earley, a friend and colleague of Chris, wrote about the struggle for peaceful existence through coffee.
- Chris and Matt also feature in a documentary film, Connected by Coffee.
- More about Higher Grounds coffee, including the latest news from Congo.
- Cooperative Coffees also shares some interesting stories on its website.
- A couple of cool additional listens: Episode 4 of Alexis Madrigal’s series on Containers is all about The Hidden Side of Coffee. And the podcast Start-Up recently told the story of probably the world’s most expensive coffee, at $16 a cup.
- It’s easy to fall into despair faced with details of how the foods we enjoy are produced, which almost inevitably involve the kind of power imbalance that makes exploitation and maltreatment not only possible but, apparently, inevitable, not only far away in former colonies but much closer to home. In Europe and in America, producers and consumers are thinking about third-party certification for local growers. What more could be done?
- Banner and cover photos of coffee cherries in Colombia by Neil Palmer (CIAT).
That paper caught the attention of @eatthispodcast which led to my first interview about my fair trade work (thrilling!) – At the crux of the conversation is the theme that fair trade isn’t fair & that as consumers we must do more than look for a label.
eatthispodcast.com/pushing-good-c…
Yep, I’ve been unpopular for saying this about #fairtrade products for some time. I did a podcast with @EatPodcast awhile back about this issue: eatthispodcast.com/pushing-good-c…
twitter.com/williamgmosele…
I came upon this episode via Jeremy Cherfas’ response to two podcasts exploring coffee: In Our Time and Wake Up and Smell the Coffee.
Quite by coincidence, I listened to two podcasts about coffee back to back. Well, it wasn’t truly a coincidence; I saw that there were two in my queue and so I interfered with the ordering to listen to them one after the other. Anyway, Benjamen Walker’s Wake up and smell the coffee was the kind of podcast I wish I could do more often.[1] Benjamen took his growing love for coffee on a global tour of discovery that took in Paris, Copenhagen and Nairobi. I don’t know whether he planned it that way, or simply took advantage of various opportunities (there was something in the credits about having received a grant to do it, so maybe it was planned as a whole.) The result was an entertaining, complex episode that exposed parts of the coffee chain that even coffee fans might not know about.
Perhaps the most telling point was made by one of the founders of Coffee Collective, in Denmark, who explained that because in the past most coffee had been produced by enslaved labour, the cost of coffee barely reflected the cost of production. That cheapness created a culture that happily tips down the drain coffee that has sat neglected too long. You wouldn’t do that with a glass or two of wine left in a bottle (although you might feed it to your vinegar mother). The historically low price of coffee is probably what also causes right-thinking people to blanch at the thought of a $15 shot.
Slave-grown coffee also came up towards the end of Lord Bragg’s sleepwalk through an episode of In Our Time on coffee. In fact, it may even have come up only during the podcast listeners’ special treat of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. It wasn’t the only interesting thing to arise late and, in my view, much too briefly. There was also the foundations of Italian coffee culture, which mandated a top price for a coffee but only if it came without service. Standing at the bar and gulping a tiny espresso was thus cheaper than paying a lot more to linger at a table. In Italy, and in France too, the sale of coffee went to the guilds that also sold distilled spirits, which explains a lot.[2] The stove-top Moka coffee maker, launched in the 1930s and still a classic icon of Italian coffee at home, became popular partly because it made a reasonable facsimile of an espresso at home, and also because it was it was futuristic, modern, and made of aluminium.
Then there are the huge differences between Italian coffee culture and the “Italian” coffee bars in London in the 50s and 60s, where patrons did linger and where the coffee was mostly milk, as it remains in so many places today. Class and coffee is a ripe area for discussion. Starbucks, apparently, was popular in blue states 20 years before it began to make inroads in red states. In that context, and the cappuccino-sipping Guardian reader, another guest raised the milkiness of caffé latte and its kin as infantilising, people walking down the street and “sucking on their sippy cups”.
Coffee producers don’t drink coffee, just as cacao farmers don’t eat chocolate. Preparation is too much of a fuss, for one thing, and for another some countries outright banned coffee roasting; beans had to go for export. (Benjamen Walker’s interview with the first coffee roasters in Kenya was eye-opening.) Now farmers are leaving the land, in part because they cannot earn enough growing coffee, and moving to the city, where they encounter, and drink, instant coffee. Coffee remains a mostly urban drink, and as urbanisation increases in the developing world, so does coffee consumption.
What I’m saying, I guess, is that the guests on In Our Time seemed to have much more interesting information to offer than the same old stories of frisky goats, the growth of Lloyds List and invention of The Tatler and The Spectator. Perhaps I know too much, but I do think I have learned a lesson listening to those two podcasts together.
What that is, I’m not yet ready to say.
Syndicated from the mothership
Photo by Rodrigo Flores on Unsplash
I have, in fact, made a similar episode: Pushing good coffee. ↩
Caffé corretto remains one of my favourite examples of Italian hypochondria and pragmatism. I did not, however, know that the fascists had outlawed espresso machines because coffee was luxurious and an import. ↩
Thanks Jeremy! I also had the opportunity to talk with @KatherineJWu of @novapbs about this recent #FairTrade #cocoa study: pbs.org/wgbh/nova/arti…
The farmers who benefit from Fair Trade don’t pass the benefits on to their workers. New paper https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-019-0311-5 @LB_Naylor first alerted me to this in my episode on Fair Trade https://www.eatthispodcast.com/pushing-good-coffee/
Pushing good coffee: Beyond merely fair in search of ethical trade by Jeremy Cherfas from Eat This Podcast
Much like the craziness of the words and the meanings which appear on egg cartons (organic, cage free, free range, etc.), “fair trade” isn’t always quite what one expects it might mean.
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Author: Chris Aldrich
I’m a biomedical and electrical engineer with interests in information theory, complexity, evolution, genetics, signal processing, theoretical mathematics, and big history.
I’m also a talent manager-producer-publisher in the entertainment industry with expertise in representation, distribution, finance, production, content delivery, and new media.
View all posts by Chris Aldrich
Fabulous new #podcast on ‘pushing good #coffee‘ featuring a discussion on #fairtrade from me, @tierrasa @highergroundstc & @coopcoffees!!
Latest episode eatthispodcast.com/pushing-good-c…