As avid readers may already know, I’ve recently moved to Vancouver, one of the convergence zones of the coffee drinking world. As it happens, I like coffee, but I’m not mental about it. Where I lived before there is a local coffee roastery. Good coffee, good price, local merchant - easy to decide from whom to buy.
The other day I went to the local grocery store (on my bike, thanks for asking, since I’m in Vancouver. I also have a new umbrella - aren’t I adjusting well). In the IGA were at least 14 different brands of coffee, from Maxwell house to something called Ethical Coffee. Among these were options of Organic, Shade Grown, Free trade and variations of the same. Within the free trade options there were about four different logos indicating the various organizations that certify the coffee to be fairly traded, and a similar plethora of logos addressing the environmental impact of the coffee farming. I saw the “TransFair” logo, as well as a logo of the ‘Rainforest Alliance’, which makes me think of Ewoks attacking Imperial troops. Some of the coffee racks had photos of Miguel the happy coffee farmer. It was all a bit complicated, and I spent some time attempting to assess the various options.
Eventually I cracked, and grabbed a bag of something and went to the checkout with the rest of the groceries - only to discover that this bag of coffee cost almost as much as a subscription to the dope.
Here’s the upshot. I’m happy enough to spend the extra few pennies for a less exploitive coffee buying experience, and a warm glow of smugness. However, I am unwilling to drive myself into poverty in pursuit of this goal. Nor do I want to buy marked up coffee from some company cleverly greenwashing the product to make more money.
Any thoughts? How do I buy coffee without going mad, or broke?
My two favourite local roasters in Vancouver are JJ Bean and Bean Around the World. Both do at least some fair trade and/or organic. I’m not sure which neighbourhood you’re in, but both of them have a several locations around the city. I’m sure other Vancouverites will be along with suggestions, as finding a good source for ethical coffee in Vancouver without going (too) broke in the process should not be a problem.
So basically you want to help as long as you don’t have to suffer for it. As Archie Bunker says it’s easy to be generous when it ain’t costing you nothing
These people you want to help live in poverty and work in awful conditions yet you aren’t willing to sacrifice your cell phone, you computer, your cable etc etc…
See this is the problem of poverty in a nutshell. I want to help as long as it isn’t too much of an effort.
I am not addressing the OP as her intentions are good, but politically correct people in general.
Well, hold on here. The OP is talking about a luxury item. If he/she has a finite budget, there is nothing wrong with trying to eke out as much joy from a small amount of money, while also trying to keep ‘fair trade’ in mind.
The OP also said he/she was willing to pay more for fair trade coffee, just within a limit.
Remember that even fair trade businesses are making someone somewhere some decent bucks, and they of course price their items up partly because it costs more to deal in fair trade coffee, and partly because us feel-gooders out there are willing to pay more for a fair trade product. Certainly, if I’m going to spend the extra dollar, I can still try to be thrifty with it, no? That’s how the market works; I don’t pay what the merchant tells me I should pay, I pay what I’m willing to pay for the product.
And, to the OP. I don’t know how much hyperbole you included in your comment about the coffee costing as much as the Dope, but that seems pretty high.
Around here, the company Green Mountain Coffee Roasters offers 10oz. bags of coffee for between $7 and $10, depending on the flavor. A pretty reasonable price, IMHO.
KRSOradio, please keep in mind that this thread is in Cafe Society, where the discussion is not focused on the other posters, but, insitead, the topic-at-hand. If you’d like you can start a debate thread in Great Debates.
As for this thread… while it is a thread involving food, it’s less about the food itself and more about where and how to buy it. Because of that, I’ll move this over to MPSIMS (where, for the sake of not hijacking the original question, arguments such as the one KRSOradio presented need to be confined to another thread).
It’s a well known fact that people will pay extra for fair trade and organic goods as compared to the regular stuff, but I sometimes wonder if some merchants are taking advantage of this by putting a higher-than-average profit margin on those items. How else do you explain that in one store, I pay $12.99 for a bag of fair trade Kicking Horse coffee at my local bulk store (whose owners are environmentally-conscious hippie types), but $15.99 for the exact same bag at a chain supermarket down the street (whose owners are probably more concerned with a quick buck)?
I’m happy to kick in a few extra bucks to contribute to reasonable quality of life for coffee producers. I just don’t want to be lining the pockets of the middleman any more than I have to for that privilege.
For the record, I buy my coffee through a local coffee shop that buys direct and roasts on the premises, and pay about $11.99/lb. That’s roughly on par with what I’d pay for “gourmet” coffee in some chain shops, so it is possible to be ethical AND thrifty at the same time (and get the bonus warm-fuzzy of supporting local small biz).
I understand the intentions of proponents of fair trade coffee (or products), but I wonder how much they would be supportive of such efforts if they knew the consequences of what the fair trade label does to the industry and the local economies affected by it. IOW, if a small group of farmers receives a mere pittance for their efforts to sell to a free trade co-op, meanwhile, the price of other coffee causes worldwide prices to drop, hurting other farmers and their economies, is it worth it to pay for the label?
Clearly, a large percentage of the extra price goes to the supermarket. I suspect the rest of it goes to free trade organization to promote their objective. If one is particularly socially conscious, just pay money to the organization which directly affects the subject/issue of concern. Buy it if tastes good, first and foremost, so that it at leasts helps signal the market that people like to get what they pay for. The real issue, the best way to make things fair is to end first world subsidies. Adding more barriers to trade will only exasperate the current problems and keep the poor poorer while making the rich richer.
Nice sound bite and I’m sure it helps you sleep at night, but it doesn’t work like that. The reasons that fair trade gets involved in the industries it does is because these are industries where the farmers have no access to the market. What your average coffee farmer makes has noting to do with the commodity price of coffee- fair trade is an attempt to fix this. Basically fair trade allows companies to charge a higher price, making it profitable for them to operate in countries where previously only monopolies could do business. This may lead to less money for middlemen, but it nearly always means more profit for the farmers- even the farmers who aren’t involved in fair trade production (since now their middlemen have to compete with the fair trade middlemen.)
Having lived in Cameroon, I’ve seen fair trade make a huge difference in people’s lives. We’re talking life and death in many cases. And I’ve seen the effects of certain industries on people- you don’t need to meet many escaped child-slaves from the cacao trade to realize that it’s a pretty bad scene out there. If you want to PM, I can talk more in detail about the specific ways that I have personally seen fair trade cotton benefit people. This film, is not something I took part in and doesn’t really do the best job of showing how fair trade benefits people, but it was filmed in the communities I lived in and gives some examples of how life is out there in the places where the things we consume are produced.
I appreciate this problem. Unfortunately, I am not able at this time to cause significant changes in the world economy. After I finish my giant robot I hope to change this.
In the meantime, I am limited to trying to make the production of my luxury items not be someone else’s sweatshop hell. There was a [thread=42918]previous post about fair trade[/thread] which addressed many of the economic issues, and ended with someone who had previously worked for a fair trade organization commenting that in general they do good. I’m willing to accept for now that this is the case, rather than debate it, unless someone has definitive or extremely strong evidence that fair trade coffee is actually evil. If there is good data that it is evil, please start a GD thread, and I will participate with vigor.
KRSOradio, If I wanted to help without suffering, I’d buy cheapest good coffee I could, and screw all other considerations. I have some disposable income, so I’m willing to drop a bit more than the lowest Walmart price for coffee, but I don’t want to just have it wind up in the importers pocket as a bonus. Nor do I want to pay more for the same product with a “green” label. Of course, now I realize that I’m restating the OP. This is why I posted in CS originally, since it was a question about getting coffee more than about world economics, but MPSIMS is fine, I bow to the power of the Mods, please don’t smite me.
Eonwe there was no hyperbole in the cost, it was $15 for a pound, which was why I threw up my hands and went to ask the dope for guidance. Thank you for your other comments, they were right on the money.
Thanks for the other suggestions. I’ll check out JJ Bean, there is one near my place. They make a nice Cafe Americano, so maybe I’ll find myself there in the morning. Any other suggestions continue to be solicited.
I buy only fair-trade coffee. It’s worth it to shop around – I discovered by chance that the coffee shop a block away from my house sells fair trade for a whole $5/kilo less than the supermarket does. (Supermarkets often have high markups on fair trade products.) Try independent coffee shops/roasters, co-ops, etc. There must be good fair trade deals in Vancouver.
Fair Trade means nice to the workers. Shade grown means nice to the environment. It looks like Rainforest Alliance means nice to both. (Go Ewoks!) Coffee doesn’t have to be Fair Trade to be an ethical purchase: Mesa de los Santos is excellent coffee and they seem to be good to their employees, but they can’t get a Fair Trade certification because they’re too big an outfit.
Fair Trade will probably cost you more and taste better than the usual Chock Full O’ Bullshit, which could very well have been last year’s Vietnamese Robusta mixed with rocks and leaves and shipped here in 100-kilo polyethylene bags. (Burlap? We don’t need no stinking burlap!") I buy from these guys.
“The story of Just Coffee began in Agua Prieta, Son., in 2003 when the Rev. Mark Adams] noticed an influx of migrants from a village in southern Chiapas…According to Adams, Just Coffee is one answer to the immigration problem. It’s not in the building of fences or militarization but in creating incentives for Chiapanecos to stay home and take care of their families.”
That’s right, good old fashioned, $5 per pound, pre-ground, packaged in non-rusting and non-degradable plastic, exploiting a third of the world while destroying a third of the environment, tastes like burnt rubber and ass Folgers.
I like to enjoy it while eating my slave-labor harvested Hershey’s bar, lounging in an Egyptian Cotton bath robe and watching episodes of The Simpsons that I know were animated in Korea by 5 year olds making 7 cents per day.
Global poverty and human rights issues cannot be solved in the supermarket; they can only be solved in the voting booth. Write letters to congress, petition parliament, promote and support policies that promote and support efforts to fight oppression. Buy your “safe and free” products all you want if it makes you feel better, but know that somewhere someone is being exploited for it, it’s just too deep in the organization to see.
Regards,
Nate (who also enjoys Mesa de los Santos from time to time and realizes that Hershey’s is a strong supporter of ethical chocolate and Fox pays more than 7 cents per hour for it’s animation, that’s not my point. My point is the shallow and sanctimonious habits of decrying any one industry of oppression while exploiting the fruits of the others. Not that I think or wish to accuse anyone of being shallow or sanctimonious; it’s the PC habit I loathe, not the people.)
A good friend of mine sits on a coop board. Coops are strange businesses. They’d rather sell free trade coffee at cost and mark up the non-free trade stuff. They’d rather sell organic milk for the lowest price they can, and sell the non-organic stuff for a little more. They are about changing the world, not merely putting food on your table, and make their pricing decisions accordingly. No one gets rich running a coop, but they do (at least ours does) try and pay everyone a living wage.
The chain supermarket is going to slap an appropriate margin on everything - if they can get a little more for free trade coffee, they will.
So the price difference you see is because of two different pressures on the organizations selling coffee.
Oh, I sleep just fine. I’m sure that the Free Trade organization’s pittance does wonders for an economy where pennies a day makes a huge difference. What is the difference in price between Free Trade Coffee (FTC) and regular coffee? I remember an article stating that the price floor was like 1.20 per pound (more for organic), or .05 above market rate if above the floor (and like $0.15 more for organic if above floor). Current market prices are like $1.26. This is going to cause market distortions as more farmers try to enter the FTC market. As more farmers enter the FTC market, the higher increase in supply of FTC, causing downward pressure on FTC prices.
But wait, there’s a price floor!
The price floor exacerbates even more farmers to enter the coffee market thereby increasing production. Worldwide demand for FTC is a small portion of the overall demand for coffee. I can’t remember what percent of all coffee produced is FTC, but it’s ridiculously small. One of the things that baffles me about the Fair Trade label is that they discriminate against large organizations. Large organizations employ lots of people, don’t fair trade proponents want to help as many people as they can? Anyway, of all the FTC coffee made (mind you, from small, often inefficient-production farms), only about 35 to 45 percent of fair-trade-certified coffee is actually sold at fair-trade prices, according to TransFair USA. The rest is sold at market prices.
Again, more farmers means an increase to supply, which leads to downward pressure in the price of coffee. Large coffee buyers like Illy, Starbucks, Seattle’s Best, Dunkin Donuts, and I’m sure a whole bunch of other retailers only buy a small percentage of fair trade coffee. According to this FTC retailer, only 12 firms in the US are 100% buyers of FTC. According to this article in Business Week 2004, P&G was committed to buying fair trade coffee, trying to become the leading US retailer of FTC, but one FTC advocate claims that P&G purchases of FTC amounted to less than 1% of its total coffee purchases.
With the price floor, combined with the production times and harvesting requirements of coffee, and the fact that it is a commoditized product, farmers are in absolutely no shape to respond to prices. The only way they can respond in the short term is to decrease production costs which leads to decreases in quality, thereby hurting the Fair Trade label. According to this site, Illy explains how they buy coffee, and the owner hereexplains other problems of the FTC label.
The price floor also sends a wrong price signal to the farmer, thinking that he can get the FTC price for his coffee. Odds are that hey won’t be able to sell the majority of his crop at that price, but because of production cycles the farmer has to gamble a year (perhaps 2) hoping to get today’s prices for coffee. However, with the glut of supply, more likely the price will drop further, causing the farmer to sell at a loss, and extending the cycle of poverty. I wish I could post an article (there might have been more than one) from The Economist and Time, but it’s subscription only (The Economist might frown upon my abuse of their privileges) and I can’t remember when the Time article was published.
Anyway, I think I made my point. As evidenced in this very thread, people are price sensitive to the price of coffee. Personally, I only usually drink mochas, so I’m especially even more price sensitive and less discerning about quality. Buying FTC will only make matters worse for both the farmer and the consumer, and as one article puts it, “only creates an island of wealth in a sea of poverty.”
Additionally, I’m nonplussed in general about organizations looking to add value (which is nothing more than marketing) through a label. I wouldn’t be surprised if a majority of the funds go to either a retailer’s profit or to the organization itself to “help spread awareness.” If one buys FTC, they should be made aware of the buying reality – little if any help to the farmer, and creating long term problems down the road, versus the warm, fuzzy feeling behind the marketing gimmick. One should concentrate on value, like organic, shade grown, etc., because at least that value is more quantifiable, i.e. what exactly is the fair trade price? who determines it? The more efficient thing to do with one’s money is to donate it to the organization that deals with that issue.
Yup. I donate what I can. However, I still wind up at the grocery store having to buy coffee. Any suggestions as how to direct my coffee-buying dollars so as to minimize human suffering?
But it’s a tasty coffee (it comes in beans and we use a cheap coffee/spice grinder)