Correction to: Is Fair Trade Really Fair to Coffee Farmers?

Everson, Washington (PRWEB) March 24, 2006

American consumers have embraced the fair trade ethic with a passion usually reserved for guilty pleasures like designer coffees and chocolates. The fair trade consumer looks for the Fair Trade Certified logo conferred by TransFair USA, the sole Fair Trade standard setting and certification agency for the United States, as assurance that the products in question were produced in safe, clean labor conditions and bought at fair prices that support rather than exploit the farmers or artisans who produced them in disadvantaged cultures around the world.

According to the Fair Trade Federation (FTF), 2002 combined fair trade gross sales in the U.S. and Canada totaled nearly $100 million USD and about half of that was in certified fair trade products like coffee and chocolate. Sales have increased steadily since then, “Proving that consumers are willing to make choices that help build sustainable livelihoods for workers abroad,” says the FTF, “and the trend will just keep getting better from here.” It looks like a win-win for all concerned.

But are those coffee farmers really winning? Arturo Segura, a Costa Rican organic coffee farmer, raised that question and several more in an exclusive interview with Saphir Lewis of World Peace Emerging, Inc. Segura grows his Sol Colibri brand organic coffee in a region with about 4000 conventional coffee farms, including his father's. Unlike his neighbors, Segura bypasses green fruit buyers, roasters and even fair trade to sell directly to stores in the U.S. His unprecedented system reaps his farmers a whopping $100 USD more per sack than any other coffee growers in the world, according to the article found at http://www.worldpeaceemerging.com.

Part of Segura’s reasons for going independent lies in the 22-page list of requirements for certification set by Fairtrade Labeling Organizations International. Certification requires an expensive fee, a hardship for the struggling farmer. A separate article on the web site contains details on FLO’s producer certification grants that can provide up to 75% of the certification fee. Other reasons lie in the system for compensating the fair trade farmers. “We are realizing now that these people are making less money than they were before, because the fair trade system doesn't have a way to cope with increases in prices,” Segura claims in the World Peace Emerging article. “The price to the farmer hasn't changed in ten years and the farmer is being paid in Mexican pesos. What happens to a developing country when the price stays the same in the currency of your country? In ten years the value went down 75%. Three groups that sell fair trade have disappeared in the last four years...I pay my farmers in U.S. Dollars and every year I pay them more than the last, because they are getting paid in dollars.”

Though Segura’s methods work for his small group of seven farms, they are impractical for the thousands of farmers in 18 coffee producing nations. Segura has been able to reap great financial rewards through independence, but not without equally large challenges and obstacles as he attempts to bridge the gap between grower and consumer and bring some prosperity home to his people. Through the Segura interview and other articles found at http://www.worldpeaceemerging.com, World Peace Emerging, Inc. begins a conversation about the challenges being faced today by both the currently poor growers of our food and the wealthy society that consumes it.

The World Peace Emerging web site, http://www.worldpeaceemerging.com, serves as an online information resource directory for individuals, organizations and agencies working for the good of all. Saphir Lewis, driving force behind World Peace Emerging, Inc., makes sure the web site undergoes constant updating and improvement, providing new, up-to-the-minute content on an ongoing basis.

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