Bill Fishbein, co-founder of Coffee Kids and founder of the Coffee Trust, published two comments in response to my recent post on FTUSA’s Fair Trade for All vision that were too good not to run as posts unto themselves. In the second, which appears below, he suggests that FT4All could generate benefits for smallholder farmers […]
Fair Trade USA recently decided to break with Fairtrade International and change the rules governing Fair Trade Certification. Fairtrade International, for its part, decided to increase the representation of producers in its governing body. These decisions shine some light on a dimension of the coffee trade that often goes unnoticed and underappreciated — coffee chain governance. […]
In a wide-ranging conversation with CRS staff last week, Fair Trade USA CEO Paul Rice defended the decision to break with FLO and open the U.S. market for Fair Trade Certified coffee to estates. He suggested there are two theories about what will happen to smallholder farmer cooperatives once estates enter the market. One theory is the zero-sum view that the estates’ […]
The joint announcement by Fair Trade USA and FLO that the two organizations will be going their separate ways at the end of this year is old news by now. It is still not entirely clear, however, what the split — and Fair Trade USA’s “Fair Trade for All” initiative, with its promise to “adapt […]
