CRS Coffeelands Blog

The good folks at the Fair Trade Resource Network have invited me to participate in an online discussion on the future of Fair Trade, along with Rodney North from Equal Exchange.  The webinar is scheduled to start at 1 pm Eastern and you can register here.

Rodney and Equal Exchange have been among the leading voices of opposition to FTUSA’s decision to rewrite the rules for Fair Trade coffee in the U.S. marketplace.  I have been one of the few people willing to suggest publicly that millions of smallholder farmers might benefit from understanding how FTUSA proposes to link them with Fair Trade markets.

Back in November, my colleague Robyn Fieser reported here on a success story from our CAFE Livelihoods project in El Salvador – how we helped the Las Colinas cooperative comply with national environmental regulations and avoid a forced closure of its wet mill by financing the installation of a wastewater treatment system.

Today, I share another story about water at Las Colinas that is less encouraging and demonstrates the complexity of the relationship between coffee farming and water resources.

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Amartya Sen, the Nobel Prize winning development economist, wrote an influential essay more than 20 years ago suggesting that “More than 100 million women are missing” due to systematic neglect and mortality of girls in patriarchal societies. With apologies to the great Dr. Sen for the title of this post, I am writing to gently remind readers and supporters of the growing number of petitions against Fair Trade for All that the estates whose entrance into the U.S. market for Fair Trade Certified coffee has stoked so much controversy are not the only ones who stand to benefit from the initiative.  There are more than 10 million smallholder coffee farmers currently outside the Fair Trade system whose future market opportunities stand to be affected by the way FT4All unfolds.  To date, they have been largely missing in the public discourse around the initiative.

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…there was silence.  The U.S. Fair Trade movement as we knew it ended on New Year’s Day, when FTUSA’s split from FLO took effect and its new certification went live.  But a week after the dawn of the FT4All era, there have been no official statements of any kind from Fair Trade USA, or new public commitments to its new certification by licensees.  Opponents of FT4All, however, are making their voices heard.

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The final data for the CRS Coffeelands Blog for 2011 are in.  Google Analyticator tells me that the Fair Trade USA split from Fairtrade International was the year’s top storyline — related posts took the top five spots.

Here are the 10 posts that were most frequently visited in 2011:

1.  Paul Rice makes the case for Fair Trade for All.

Fair Trade USA CEO Paul Rice explains the motivations behind the split from Fairtrade International and the vision for increased social impact under FT4All.  (published 6 October 2011) 

2. Merling Preza makes the case against Fair Trade for All. 

Merling Preza, General Manager of PRODECOOP, a successful Fair Trade cooperative in Nicaragua she helped to create with Paul Rice during the 1980s, explains why FT4All worries her and hundreds of thousands of smallholder farmers in Latin America and the Caribbean.  (published 9 November 2011.)

3. Where there is no co-op.

Reflections on how FT4All’s proposal to link unorganized smallholder farmers to premium markets may  address a perennial challenge for international development agencies like ours as it responds to the current push within the coffee industry to expand the frontiers of sustainable smallholder sourcing.  (published 13 October 2011)

4.  Fair Trade USA-FLO split: What does it mean for smallholders?

Initial reflections on the big news.  (published 30 September 2011)

5.  Fair Trade for All: A summary.

An annotated list of all my posts on FT4All.  (I later published an updated version of this post.  (published 31 October 2011)

6.  This is what innovation looks like.

A photo essay on the successful “honey coffee” pilot by the 5 de junio cooperative in Nicaragua.  (published 19 January 2011)

7.  CAFE trading data and infographics.

Some final price data from our CAFE Livelihoods project that started a good discussion here of assessing impact at origin.  (published 9 December 2011)

8.  Las Cruces: Making a name for itself.

A coffee biography of the Las Cruces cooperative in El Salvador, which registered some important milestones in 2011, with portraits of some of its members.  (published 3 March 2011)

9.  Throwing haymakers at Fair Trade.
published 18 May 2011
Fair Trade made headlines in May when a careful study — and some careless coverage — suggested its impacts on smallholders have not been altogether positive.  This is the first in a series of posts analyzing the study and the coverage it got in the mainstream press.

10.  More on quality, innovation and risk.

How Equal Exchange is increasing coffee quality in El Salvador while reducing the risk of quality-driven innovation to smallholder farmers.  (published 7 December 2010)

Our CAFE Livelihoods project closed on 30 September 2011 after three years of work with more than 7,000 smallholder farmers in Mexico and Central America.   Since then, we have been collecting and analyzing the final data from the project, and recently submitted the CAFE Livelihoods Final Report to the donor.

We also asked researchers at the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) to have a look at a slew of project documents and provide an independent assessment of our performance, both internally (against the performance targets we set for ourselves) and externally (in relation to other, similar projects).  Here is the CIAT desk review.

As we close the books on the CAFE Livelihoods project, we want to open them here in a spirit of transparency and in the hope of fostering some learning among smallholder farmers, their business partners and the non-profits who serve them.  I feel there are some lessons to be learned from what we did well, and from what we did not do perhaps as well as we might have.

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Many moons ago, I suggested that microlots can help everyone in the coffee trade, even farmers who don’t produce them and roasters who don’t buy them.  The argument is that by better understanding the quality of the coffee they have to offer — a skill that is developed naturally in the pursuit of microlots — farmer organizations can offer differentiated products to different buyers based on those buyers’ specific needs, and maximize their sales revenues.  I wanted to develop a graphic to go with the post and illustrate the argument, but didn’t have time.  The recent discussion here of assessing impact at origin has given me the push I needed to get the infographic done.

Quality-based differentiation maximizes value.

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For me, leaving my office and driving to the coffeelands is usually cause for great joy and reverence.  I recently returned from a visit to the coffeelands in Colombia that was short on joy and long on reverence: I met with families seeking shelter in the coffeelands after being displaced by acts of terrible violence.  Hearing the wrenching stories of displacement in the days before Christmas, I couldn’t help but turn them over in my mind with two rich theological reflections.  One was Mother Teresa’s reminder that the hungry, naked and homeless among us are “Christ in distressing disguise.”   The other was the idea that the stories I heard represent a cruel contemporary twist on the search for shelter in Luke’s Christmas Gospel.

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Last week I posted some final sales data from our recently concluded CAFE Livelihoods project.  It provoked some thoughtful comments and rich discussion, most of which centered around the flaws in the presentation of the data.  I look forward to revisiting the issue of assessing impact at origin in the New Year.  In the meantime, and without getting into the finer points of random sampling or other statistical minutiae, I just want to suggest that even presenting the same data I did last week in a different way — privileging total revenue over price per pound — creates a very different visual impression in terms of impact at origin.

The planetary presentation.

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