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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
…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 […]
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 […]
Earlier this week, two academics published an insightful Fair Trade infographic that sheds some light on the current rift in the Fair Trade movement. Today, I try my hand at putting data from our CAFE Livelihoods project into an infographic that may contribute to the discussion. Our project data from the 2010/11 harvest suggest that […]
Last night, a grad student from the pioneering agroecology department at UC Santa Cruz turned me on to some recently published infographics on the Fair Trade system. (Thanks, Nick.) I am publishing a link to the graphs here because they are a pleasure to behold. And they also help, at a time of great upheaval […]
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 […]
When FTUSA decided a few months ago to fundamentally rewrite the rules of Fair Trade for the U.S. market, the news hit the Fair Trade fold with all the force of an earthquake. The aftershocks have been making themselves felt for weeks: position statements by smallholder farmer networks, governance shake-ups at competing certifiers, ranging debates […]
On Halloween, I published a post summarizing everything written here on the Fair Trade for All debate and promised to leave this issue alone for a while. With new information continuing to emerge in this evolving process, it has proven harder than I thought to keep my word. Yesterday I published three more new posts […]
