Category: Farmworkers

242. FTUSA’s Independent Smallholders Standard: The criteria

2012-02-13 Coffeelands Staff Comments Off

The Fair Trade USA Independent Smallholders Standard includes 135 requirements. Here is a visual representation that suggests they are focused primarily on empowerment, social responsibility and environmental stewardship. (If you haven’t already done so, I would suggest downloading the Periodic Table of the Acronyms — an essential resource that will help you make sense of […]

241. FTUSA’s Independent Smallholders Standard: Now and later

Coffeelands Staff Comments Off

In its draft Independent Smallholders Standard, Fair Trade USA adopts a familiar approach, identifying minimum criteria that participants must meet to qualify for certification initially, as well as progress criteria they must fulfill over time. These graphs show what farmers and the organizations supporting them have to do now get certified, and what they can […]

240. FTUSA’s Independent Smallholders Standard: The empowerment agenda

Coffeelands Staff Comments Off

Opponents of FTUSA’s Fair Trade for All initiative have focused in their public communications on the participation of coffee estates in the U.S. Fair Trade market, and characterized their resistance as a stand for smallholders. They have mostly ignored the fact that FT4All also opens the door to independent smallholder farmers. On the rare occasions […]

237. The future of smallholder Fair Trade

2012-02-01 Coffeelands Staff Comments Off

Yesterday I participated in an online forum on the future of smallholder Fair Trade hosted by the Fair Trade Resource Nework. My presentation, in synthesis, went something like this: Fair Trade and Fair Trade Certification have catalyzed smallholder farmer organization and empowerment over the past decade through their support for farmer-led cooperatives. But there are […]

236. 2012: The year of the impact-at-origin baseline?

2012-01-31 Coffeelands Staff Comments Off

I had a long conversation last week with a specialty coffee luminary that ended in a surprising statement about how little the industry really understands about its impact at origin after all these years. We talked about the state of sustainability in the coffee industry in general, and the current controversy in the Fair Trade […]

235. Online discussion: The future of Fair Trade

2012-01-23 Coffeelands Staff Comments Off

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 […]

233. 10 million missing farmers

2012-01-09 Coffeelands Staff Comments Off

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 […]

232. And on the seventh day…

2012-01-07 Coffeelands Staff Comments Off

…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 […]

231. Top posts of 2011

2012-01-04 Coffeelands Staff Comments Off

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 […]

223. Clarification on NYT reference to CRS

2011-11-28 Coffeelands Staff Comments Off

Last week, The New York Times ran a story on the rupture between Fair Trade USA and Fairtrade International and its implications for the Fair Trade movement. In my post on the story, I noted that the reporter made a confusing reference to our role in the coffee certification process: “For consumers who pay attention […]