In this article I start an interview with local coffee entrepreneur Bill Barrett (he was instrumental in starting the Planet Bean coffee shops and roastery) about the Fairtrade movement. It turns out that he is on the board of directors of FairTrade International as an NFO (National Fairtrade Organization) rep. In effect, one of the key people managing the entire international Fairtrade movement lives right here in Guelph. This first part of the story serves as a bit of an introduction to the concept and how it works in practice.
Bill mentions that the first steps toward Fairtrade involved imports of handicrafts and eventually became a network called "Ten Thousand Villages" Stores. I found a website for this group, but it only ships to people in the USA. It did direct me to an affiliated business in Port Colborne, titled "Villages Port Colborne".
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A subtlety that Mr. Barrett goes over somewhat quickly needs emphasis. The word "Fairtrade" and phrase "Fair Trade" mean substantively different things. The former is a registered trademark that a business can only use if it is certified by the international organization that Bill is involved with. As Bill explains, you only get to show this on your label if you agree to a fairly long list of pretty important commitments---including regular inspections to ensure you are really doing what you are supposed to be doing.
In contrast, "Fair Trade" isn't registered and can be legally used by just about anyone. But having said that, there is a group in Canada called "The Canadian Fair Trade Network" which has some sort of lessor relationship to Fairtrade Canada.
What are Fair Trade Programs?
Fairtrade Canada operates Fair Trade Programs in collaboration with the Canadian Fair Trade Network (CFTN) and the Association québécoise du commerce équitable (AQCÉ). We work with local community groups to boost awareness and understanding of trade issues, and to promote the purchase of Fairtrade products. Towns, Campuses, Schools, Workplaces, Faith Groups and Events can be designated as Fair Trade (not certified - only products and producers can be Fairtrade certified). To become designated, organizers need to submit a completed application form demonstrating compliance with specific requirements. Ambassadors are recognized as leaders in their fair trade community. (from the Fairtrade.ca FAQs)
The difference is that a group can be designated as "Fair Trade", but a product has to be certified "Fairtrade". If you see the words "Fair Trade" on a product there's no real guarantee that the premium you are paying is actually going to the producer. (More about this later on.)
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Bill mentions "Francisco van der Hoff", which is the Spanish form of his name. This makes sense as van der Hoff spent a lot of time as a priest in South America. But the original Dutch form of his name is Frans van der Hoff. The second thing Barrette mentions several times is that he is a "worker priest".
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| Frans van der Hoff. Image c/o Paris Match. ("Fair Dealing" provision) |
This is an obscure, but highly relevant issue. During the 1940s there was an opinion that the industrial worker class of France were moving away from Roman Catholicism and towards atheist systems of thought---like Communism. Some priests believed that this was because the church parish system was increasingly irrelevant to the lives of working people. With this idea in mind, they stepped away from the idea of being paid officials in charge of a specific congregation and instead got a job like everyone else. In effect, they ceased being middle-class professionals and instead became part of the working class.
The Church was somewhat ambivalent about this because they were afraid that the priests who went off to work in factories with the proletariat would end up becoming Marxists and leave the church. It appears that this did happen sometimes, but a more common problem was that it tended to radicalize the clergy and get them to become more sympathetic to the poor. (Which, as everyone knows, is definitely anti-Christian.) For that reason, the church suppressed the movement for about ten years in the 1950s, but then it allowed them to come back in 1963.
As Barrett explains, van der Hoff went to South America and---from the way he describes the man's trajectory---he was influenced by "Liberation Theology". That's an interesting tangent that readers should learn a bit about, because it fits so neatly into the Fairtrade story.
In a nutshell, Liberation Theology is based upon the two following concepts:
- changing the church from being top-down hierarchical to bottom-up decentralized, through the creation of "base communities" consisting of ordinary Christians who try to figure out for themselves how to apply the teachings of Jesus to their lives
- prioritizing help for the poor and abused over that of preserving the present form of social organization
Unfortunately, helping the poor and encouraging social change was pretty much the American government's definition of "COMMUNISM!!!!!!!!" during the cold war. This meant that the CIA helped local elites fight a war against this movement all across Central and South America---and that involved a lot of torture and murder. (That's what Bill is talking about when he mentions the "carnage" in Chile. That would be the coup against Salvador Allende.)
I mention this background because I think it's important for people of good will to understand how much of our lives are "intertwined" with those of other people. When you walk into Planet Bean or Costco to buy Fairtrade coffee, stop sometimes and think about how what you are doing fits into a multi-decade long struggle to change Roman Catholic theology. It stretches from worker priests to liberation theology to a redefinition of the way we interact economically with the global South. I also think that it's an exercise in understanding that no matter how insignificant your particular struggle to make the world a better place may seem, you are still an important part of it.
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It's also important to understand theoretically what Frans van der Hoff was doing when he decided to "cut out the middlemen" (or "coyotes"). I can remember reading a passage written by the famous economist John Kenneth Galbraith (who studied at the Ontario Agriculture College in Guelph before it became a University) where he talked about the way family farms are exploited in North America. He said that it was simply a function of having a huge number of farmers dealing with a very small number of grain merchants. That's the situation that Bill Barrette is describing in his talk, and the formal economic term for this is an "oligoposony". And it's also exactly the same situation that led to prairie farmers in Canada forming wheat pools to market their harvests for them, as I documented in my conversation with Peter Cameron.
In a sense, the coyotes were offering a useful service to the small coffee farmers. After all, for years and years who was going to take their coffee to market if they didn't? That was then, though. Now it is now possible to organize chains of distribution that don't involve exploitative middle-men. But I will point out at this point that this probably wouldn't have been possible to organize on the scale that Bill Barrette is describing without many of features of the modern economy---sophisticated trade networks plus computer technology that make communication instant and free. Moreover, it probably wouldn't have been possible to "boot strap" this system into existence without the existing network of church communities that could be easily organized into an "at cost" marketing and retail network for the very first sales. (That's the same process that Alphonse Desjardins followed when he convinced Catholic parishes to set up credit unions in Quebec, as I pointed out in my interview with Peter Cameron.)
This isn't to say that non-exploitative trading networks couldn't have existed before now, but it would have much, much harder for them to come into existence before this historical moment.
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With this article I've pretty much maxxed-out the "freebie" part of my Soundcloud service. (This article's soundclip puts me at 99% full up.) From now on, I'll have to start paying for the service. It's $15/month, which I think is a fair price. But that's an on-going expense that will have to come out of what I get from subscriptions. So if any of you have been thinking about subscribing but haven't got around to it, this might be a good time to do so. It's easy to do through Patreon and Pay Pal.
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I think that Bill had his names mixed-up when he was describing how the first brand name for Fairtrade coffee was created. The novel's name is Max Havelaar and it was written by Eduard Douwes Dekker, who used the pen name of "Multatuli" (it's Latin for "I have suffered much"). The book that the coffee brand is named after has the full title of Max Havelaar; or, The Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company.
I haven't read the book, but I did find a movie based upon it that you can watch in full on YouTube. (I warn you, though, it's almost three hours long!) It is a pretty representative example of the sort of "progressive art house" movies that I used to watch as a university student---like The Battle of Algiers and Burn!. It was supported by the Indonesian government, but they wouldn't let it be shown in their country for ten years because it paints a pretty unflattering portrait of the local elite who collaborated with Dutch colonial authorities. Either way---judging by the movie---the book is a pretty standard description of the perversions of colonialism, much like Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Orwell's Shooting an Elephant. (If nothing else, I liked the shots of Indonesia and the people who lived there---whether it was accurate or not, I haven't a clue.)
No matter what you can say about the book as a work of fiction, it seems to have been useful insofar as it created a story about coffee and where it comes from. And that explains why it is probably a good idea to buy Fairtrade commodities. A quick search on line shows that the brand name is still used in parts of Europe.
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When Bill talks about the relationship between "FLOCERT" and "Fairtrade International" he talks about it being "ISO certified" and this is a "Chinese Wall" system. I think that readers might be excused for not understanding what he's talking about.
First "FLOCERT" stands for "Fairtrade Labelling Organization CERTification". Here's a Youtube video from the organization's website that explains their mandate.
A "Chinese Wall" is a business term (supposedly, it refers to the Great Wall of China) for the practice of splitting apart different parts of a company to lessen conflicts of interest. In the case of the Fairtrade business, I would assume that this comes about because the organization needs to totally avoid even the appearance of bias. That's because the product that they are selling is charging a premium price for something that is totally intangible to the final consumer. In other words, they have to take it totally on trust that the extra money they are paying is actually being passed on to the person picking the beans.
Let me illustrate with an example that I heard about on a radio program years ago. In a community in British Columbia there were a lot of people paying a premium for free-range, organic eggs. But a journalist went around and asked local chicken farmers about how well they were doing. It turned out that none of them were actually selling these types of eggs to the local stores. When he went and asked the store owners about this, he found that they were genuinely surprised to hear this. They'd been buying eggs from a middle-man who assured them that they were local, free-range, and, organic.
The reporter went "under cover" and followed this distributor and followed him to a purported chicken farm. But when he looked around, he found that the barns were empty. What he did find, however, was that truck loads of eggs were being imported from a factory farm in Alberta and that they were being taken out of the cartons and put in new ones that described them as being "locally-grown, free-range, and, organic".
The problem is that the extra money you pay to the producer is a tremendous incentive for larceny. If there isn't any sort of oversight mechanism, it will probably end up in some slime ball's pocket. In the case of organic food that people grow in Canada, they now use exactly the same sort of process with the same sort of "Chinese Wall" system. This involves the "Pro-Cert" company, which is also "ISO certified" (more about that later). And it is what producers use to get accredited so they can become officially "organic" (and other things too---like "gluten free").
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| A selection of logos that Pro-Cert certifies |
Bill mentioned that FLOCERT is "ISO certified", as is Pro-Cert. This is an interesting point that bears explanation.
To a large extent our modern society is based on the same sort of trust that shoppers need to have when they buy Fairtrade or organic products at a store. For example, when a car factory orders tons of nuts and bolts of a certain type, they have to know that they will actually be the size and strength specified. That's because if they aren't the autos that they build with them might wear out well before they are supposed to---or even worse, fail when going down the road, causing dangerous accidents.
It used to be that businesses made all their parts themselves, or at least had a long-term relationship with specific suppliers. That might have been OK in a world where people rode buggies. But the machinery we depend upon nowadays involves components from all over the world, and it's made by people we will never ever meet personally. Moreover, because of international trade, we can't even rely upon a government agency to regulate things like this for us. Instead, what business depends on is an independent company that they pay to inspect their production line to make sure that it follows the standardized practices needed to gain the ISO ("International Standardization Organization") certification. Once it has that, then other companies will know that they can trust that the bolts will fit and not break.
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| Yup, that's why the wheels don't fall off your car! |
FLOCERT plus ISO certification means that when you buy your coffee with the Fairtrade logo on it, you can be pretty safe in assuming that the extra money you are paying actually goes to the people who pick the beans.
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I've gone into some detail to explain the certification system because there have been complaints raised by some economists about this and whether or not Fairtrade actually helps coffee farmers. But I've been repeatedly warned by readers to keep my stories relatively short. So I'll stop here and continue at a later date.
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