I love bringing home my coffee and discussing with my child how “Bird Friendly symbiotically affects the present and future lives of farmers and the environment.

We love ignorance…it takes us off the hook. It kills our buzz. First efforts to increase social awareness are often criticized, but the debating process usually creates a better model for all concerned.

I think that we are a parched society when it comes to global connectiveness and responsibility. Drink the “good” stuff, and thanks to those that not only do things right, but the right things as well.

Peace and gratitude to you Sara, Melanie and contributers for the forum and information.

You’re right: FT is a start. I would not go so far as to say it’s a good one, though. I have yet to find any clear information (if it in fact exists) as to whether the FT system even actually pays quality premiums. And that says nothing of the fact that “the little guy” truly isn’t represented in a FT system that requires membership in a co-op.

To my mind, this conversation makes little sense including “C” in it because, ostensibly, these lovely ladies have not embarked on a cross-country tour to taste all the interesting 24 hour diner coffee they can find. In theory they want to highlight sustainable coffees that also actually taste good (implying high green quality); and that is very, very difficult to do with “C” coffees.

Folks like Mr Bagersh and Oromia are producing fine coffees in Ethiopia and they seem to have the right i dea–getting quality coffees into the hands of quality-conscious buyers–but they have largely migrated toward a stale, static system (FT) that has no apparatus for quality or sustainability multipliers such as some of the more well-rounded cert systems out there encompass. The knife edge of quality-seekers in the market are miles ahead by now with their own sustainability systems. And that brings us back to the original comment by Jason. I would add to that the question of which takes preeminence: tasting truly fine coffees that happen to be sustainable, or seeking out sustainable coffees that happen to be extraordinarily good. Of course they are not mutually exclusive, but I would say again that to a quality coffee purveyor the former premise needs to be the focus and not the latter.

My opinion.

My two cents:

I base much of what I have come to believe about the coffee market and Fair Trade coffees in particular on what I feel is a fairly accurate fact:

The global coffee market is at best inherently flawed, inequitable and imperfect.

Coffee is the second largest traded commodity in the world behind crude oil. It is the second largest imorted good into the US behind crude oil. The majority of coffee producing countries are developing and third world. It is a global market with millions of lives directly or inderictly effected by its pricing and production trends.

Global markets are inherently inequitable due to a lack of market information and trade infrastructures in the developing world… Growers in Ethiopia can’t google the current commodities price of coffee. Often growers don’t have the capacity or the infrastructure (roads) to bring their coffee to processing factories. We know the majority of the coffee grown in the world is grown by very small farmers without processing capabilities on hand.

Global markets are also inherently flawed and suseptable to corruption. A farmer with no market information or ability to access prospective buyers is forced to sell to local brokers. It is not a profitable business for the majority of coffee growers.

Global markets, in particular coffee, are inherently inequitable. At the turn of the century when commodity coffee prices around the world hit their lowest point in a century growers at origin abandoned their crops and were sometimes forced of their land for lack of sustainable income. In the US the coffee market, led by Starbucks was booming with record profits. Inequitable.

I admit the coffee that Jason and Aron are talking about are not considered “commodity”coffees. They are specialty coffee brokered by coffee roasters and importers in the western world. Not coffee traded on the commodity exchanges in NY and Germany where price is dictated by commodity traders and not the cost of production or the value of quality. Across the board high end Arabica coffees deemed “specialty” by third party evaluators are socially and environmentally sustainable.

However, the majority of consumers don’t know this. And, unfortunetly, the majority of coffee grown is not sustainable either for the grower or the environment.

My point, I guess, is that Fair Trade and Organic Certifications are not perfect market structures but they are a damn good start. I would argue that the most improtant value of a product is the human value. No coffee is good enough to justify near slave labor.

I would add that the quality of FTO coffees has improved dramatically over the last decade. In fact the Oromia Co-Op in Ethiopia has won multiple awards for the quality of their FTO Harrar and they are far from alone.

One of the important things to remember is that both Fair Trade and Organic Certifiers mandate constant quality oversight on certified farms.

Also, an FTO farmer will receive more than the standard $1.36 a pound (actually the farmers themselves receive nothing near that price point) if their coffee is graded higher. It’s in their best interest not to “study the exam” but to focus on quality.

Wow this is getting way to long…

I’ll finish with this. My shop specializes in Fair Trade and Organic coffees. We also purchase non certified coffees. In fact we just sold a bunch of Lot #5 in the Costa Rican Cup of Excellence.

I cupped that Costa Rican and it’s very good. But I also cupped our FTO Ethiopian Yergacheffe and I am hard pressed to say the Cup of Excellence is that much better.

My goal is to sell as much coffee as possible and to do it with a conscience. I can do that by tapping into the marketability of FTO coffees and I can do that by buying non-cert coffees. But above all they must be good and they must be ethically sourced.

I think to downplay the importance of sourcing ethical coffees is to turn a blind eye to the reality of our industry. But I’ll admit that if an FTO coffee isn’t good it won’t do either the roaster retailer any good or the grower. I believe the TransFair and Co-Op’s around the world know this.

Quality and ethics are not mutually exclusive.

Thanks if actually made it through all this… Sorry for ranting girls.

Mike

After years of drinking whatever Columbian coffee was cheapest at the local supermarket, Melanie introduced me to a new way of consuming coffee. First she introduced me to GOOD TASTING coffee, first from Moca Joe’s in Brattleboro, VT, and then from Coffee Lab in Tarrytown, NY. At first I was a bit taken aback by paying 3x what I had been paying for coffee but it makes sense to me that if I am paying that little for coffee, there is now way that the grower can pay a decent wage to his employees. I earn enough to afford to pay a bit more (I mean how much do I spend a month on coffee anyway) and feeling a little better about myself is worth it. Can I guarantee that the extra gets to the grower and picker? No!. But at least I have done my bit and if I don’t there is no chance at all.
The second thing that has happened is that I have found that I am much more discriminating about the taste of coffee. (confession, I usually put milk and sugar in my coffee). Even among “good” coffee that people I respect and who know more about coffee than I do, there are some coffees I like and others I don’t. I tend to prefer a medium roast and a mellow taste. I do not like “bitter” coffee. Among the coffees at Coffee Lab, my favorite is a Columbian Mesa de los Santos. but I am also fond of Decaf Sidamo which I make for my wife and guests and sometimes mix in for myself when I do not want to much caff. I admit that I have not verified the details of whether these are fair trade or shade grown, etc. but I know Coffee Lab tries to be responsible about their choices of coffee sources.

So, briefly. I pay more because I think it is the ethical thing to do and because I get better tasting coffee.

Happy drinking. If anyone finds a good tasting low alcohol beer please let me know.

Ed

I believe with all the non-taste certifications floating around out there, there’s too much hype people are trying to cash in on. I absolutely abhor certifications that have nothing to do with taste (read: What does so-called “Fair Trade” taste like??)

I hate to admit it, but if a tomato that were grown on a huge corporate farm actually tasted better, I’d buy it over the organic one almost any day. Thankfully, that is rarely the case; but it highlights, in my opinion, the crux of the coffee situation perfectly. TASTE has to be the final arbiter, not ancillary considerations that add nothing to the cup. The sad news: the awful super majority of coffee consumers don’t know what clean fruit, high-grown, low/no defect, naturally sweet, well-roasted coffee actually tastes like (they lazily rely on buzz words such as “Fair Trade,” “organic,” “shade-grown,” “bird-friendly” and the like to signal to their lazy brains that this coffee is somehow good tasting when in reality it may…or it may not be good tasting. The good news: people who grow really great tasting coffee much more often than not are taking care of their environment and the people who harvest the coffee. Growing good-tasting coffee very often goes hand in hand with doing it sustainably…and you don’t need to pay some Western NGO to certify to guilt-ridden rich white folks in rich countries what these farmers already know in their heart to be true.

Obviously, I have lots of energy on this issue; but as a coffee buyer and roaster I’m not afraid to admit the un-PC truth: if a conventionally-grown, non-FT coffee tastes better on the cupping table versus its FTO counterparts, I’m going to go with the former 9 out of 9 times. Why? Because TASTE is what matters most. And growing coffee well (i.e., sustainably, with judicial use of pesticides as topography and soil conditions dictate) actually makes it taste better. Simple truth.

One more simple truth: so-called social and environmental awareness sometimes looks a whole lot different to a producer or a coffee picker than it does to a person who lives in a highly industrialized Western nation. We often put our solutions onto their problems to assuage our own guilt, never realizing that our solution not only doesn’t solve their problem…but that their “problem” isn’t really even considered a problem to them in their context. This is especially true the higher up the quality coffee growing spectrum you go. NGO protection programs that have nothing to do with the actual taste quality of the product only perpetuate this scenario because those programs often disincentivize farmers from producing a quality product that WILL earn a genuine profit from buyers willing to pay for it by paying them a guaranteed minimum anyway for whatever product they show up to market with, regardless of actual quality…taste quality. In effect, the farmers “study to the exam” instead of studying to learn and affect real change in the world.

In other words, I’ve tasted more than my fair share of nasty-tasting “FTO” coffees.

Sorry for the long sermon! AND THANK YOU FOR POSTING JASON’S COMMENT AND FOR YOUR THOUGHTFUL RESPONSES.