We've got used to seeing the Fair Trade logo on many products, but would you know what the Rainforrest Alliance logo looked like, or the Utz Kapeh logo, or even what these two certifiers stood for or whether they were ethical marks?
This is a real problem for those farms who can't gain Fair Trade certification, simply because they don't form part of a co-operative.
Last September I had the priviledge of visiting a selection of farms in Brazil, to help me understand what was going on at origin.
We saw some small farms who were part of the Poco Fundo co-operative. A huge farm called "Monte Alegre", and finally a medium sized farm called "Daterra".
Before I went to Brazil I hadn't grasped that to become "Fair Trade certified" you had to be part of a co-operative, that was a fundamental criteria of getting the certification.
Of course this leaves large stand alone farms out in the cold. They may well be behaving in a perfectly ethical way, but from our perspective because they don't have a "Fair Trade" logo they can't be truly ethical, can they?
Well nothing could be further from the truth, it's simply a case of in terms of certifiers, that the Fair Trade foundation got there first, and as a result all other certifiers appear second rate.
If you ever have the privilege of visiting the Daterra farm, you'll start to understand how crazy the situation is. Their attitude is one of total respect for the environment. They compost as much waste from the coffee processing part as possible. In fact because they need more compost than they can produce, they bring in waste from a nearby sugar cane processor.
They recyle old broken pieces of furniture. They have a crech facility for the children of their workforce on the farm. They even have a plant nursery of indigenous plants which they plant out around the farm so as to preserve the biodiversity. I use the word "awe" too much in my blogs, however I was in awe at the amount of effort that they put into building a truly sustainable farm.
Yet not a Fair Trade certificate is to be found. Why? because they are a stand alone farm, which brings me back to the other certifiers. They are not second rate, they each stand for slightly different aspects when it comes to sustainability and as a consumer you should be able to use this knowledge when looking to purchase ethically traded coffee in the future, and not simply be just looking out for the Fair Trade logo.
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Hi, I am a little confused by your post. I have checked the Fair Trade site at http://www.fairtrade.org.uk/about_standards.htm, and it seems they do not only certify co-operatives.
As far as I know the Fair Trade certification is not about the environment, it is about paying fair wages, and ensuring that there is no forced or child labour in the product.
That is something particularly important to me, I find it lessens my enjoyment of consuming my luxury items to think they may have been produced by those means.
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