As fresh coffee became more and more the beverage of choice for consumers in the last couple of decades of the twentieth century, this very lucrative industry exploded. Capitalist conglomerates forced third world growers to live at barely subsistence levels while producing coffee that provided immense profits to the corporations.
This was the crisis that took the fair trade movement into the mainstream and out of the shadows, where it had existed since the 1950s. Organic fair trade coffee eventually became the rallying banner behind which even more products began sheltering.
What started with coffee in general and turned into an emphasis on organic fair trade coffee in particular didn’t stop there. After all, small farmers and producers in other industries were also being exploited by large corporations, and they could benefit just as much from fair trade deals.
Fair trade food in general came into its own as a concept, always including environmentally friendly and organic growing methods as criteria for certification. So now you have fair trade fruit, spices, sugar and products like cotton.
Thanks to the fair trade movement, you can now go into entirely fair trade stores and find all sorts of manufactured products, as well as fruit, vegetables, and of course, organic fair trade coffee.
That’s still the granddaddy of them all, recognized as the industry that kick started everything. As people saw farmers being helped in that industry, it inspired them to extend similar help to many others.
It’s become exciting to watch, to see where the fair trade concept is going to land next.
To read more The Story So Far With Certified Organic Fair Trade Coffee
There aren’t any types of coffee beans that are intrinsically more “organic” than any other. The differences among the beans lie primarily in the different species, while geographic location, soil content, and finally the growing and roasting methods account for the final flavor and other characteristics.
There are several different species, but two in particular make up about ninety percent of beans used in coffee worldwide. These are the arabica (Coffea arabica) and robusta (Coffea canephora) species. Arabica lends itself more to gourmet coffee or higher quality blends, while robusta is usually used in lower grade blends.
Programs can work to produce fair trade certified coffees from either species. You would think robusta would be a better choice for farmers in these programs, with higher volumes and quicker maturation, but both species are very valuable, so the more salient factor is where these growers live.
Those in northern Africa, Yemen and some Latin American countries will grow Arabica, while central and western African and south Asian farmers grow robusta. Fair trade producers will purchase coffee beans from all the different regions to create different blends.
Obviously, with the arabica coffee beans being more difficult to produce, and the plants more prone to disease and infestation than robusta plants, growing arabica organically can be more difficult, because this means not using either chemical fertilizers or pesticides.
Yet even with these difficulties, the high quality of the fair trade organic coffee blends that include both arabica and robusta make the process or organic cultivation worth not just the extra work, but worth the extra cost as well.
To read more Two Main Types Of Coffee Beans
Many coffee roasters selling coffee that’s fair trade make a point about advertising that their coffee is sold in “whole bean” style, and that may make you wonder if fresh whole bean coffee is somehow connected to fair trade in an intrinsic way.
Nothing could be farther from the truth. Any sort of coffee can come stored in bags of whole beans rather in ground form. Yet the freshness of coffee that comes in whole-bean packages does in fact lend itself quite easily to the fair trade way of doing things.
What makes fresh whole bean coffee different from and perhaps even superior to coffee that’s ground is simply that the consumer rather than the manufacturer takes the final step before the coffee is brewed; the grinding of the beans.
This is significant because as soon as beans are ground, they start losing freshness. Both aroma and taste begin to fade. This process might be arrested via a vacuum-packed container, but the moment the consumer opens that pack, the deterioration picks up again.
However, whole beans keep for weeks longer, so grinding just before brewing leads to fresh coffee that tastes and smells much better.
There is nothing particularly special about fresh whole bean coffee, in the sense that it’s more prevalent in a fair trade context than any other context. Yet fair trade retailers who sell coffee in this form have a small advantage even over non-fair trade establishments selling coffee in whole-bean form.
The time it takes for those beans to get from the farm to the consumer is very likely shorter, and when you combine that with the organic growing methods of the fair trade version, the coffee is likely to be very tasty and fresh indeed.
To read more Differences Between Fair Trade Coffee And Fresh Whole Bean Coffee
Fair trade organic coffeeseems to be becoming more popular lately, and considering the original aims of the fair trade movement, that should be a good thing.
In the coffee world, whose profits are only exceeded by the oil industry, mega corporations have previously forced coffee-growing farmers to produce as cheaply as possible so low prices could be passed to customers in the first world.
One person’s gourmet coffee was another person’s subsistence-level farming. But fair trade was supposed to start changing that.
It’s not surprising that the entry of big corporations into fair trade organic coffee has been greeted with skepticism. Many aren’t known for adherence to environmentally sustainable practices, which calls into question the “organic” side of the equation.
Given that Walmart, in particular, is known for squeezing suppliers down to the lowest conceivable price so its prices back home will be cheap, it’s hard to imagine that from this day forward it will always buy coffee from small producers for a price that is appropriate for their labor.
Fair trade organic coffee is a good idea, in that it aims to give smaller farmers and producers more control over their labor and their products, as well as higher prices and a more livable life.
It’s uncertain whether any large corporation entering into the fair trade food movement can resist trying to take all the control back into its own hands. Many people worry that farmers are going to wind up no better off in the end, and that they’ll have to start the movement all over again for the same reasons.
To read more Fair Trade Organic Coffee Aims To Give Control To Farmers And Producers
