Not Just the Usual Grind

Business Week’s website has a story looking at whether Transfair USA’s efforts to expand Fair Trade certification far beyond coffee dilute the purity of Fair Trade. Included are some critical comments by Equal Exchange’s Rink Dickinson. For those hoping to help small farmers, as opposed to the foreign corporations that often swindled them out of their land in the colonial era, one advantage of coffee is that most of it is grown by small farmers. Not so with other products such as cut roses or bananas, which are now getting Fair Trade certification. Fair Trade is a little more complicated when the grower is a Dole plantation and the retailer is Wal-Mart.

Also, Huffington Post has a blog entry from an “environmental correspondent” about the impact of traditional sun-grown coffee. Though again, my personal peeve (see P.S. in this post), I can’t believe a university journalism professor can’t spell Colombia.

Following up on yesterday’s post about Counter Culture Coffee’s new direct trade certification, here’s an interesting article about a tussle for the allegiance of ever-trendy-yet-aware Asheville, North Carolina’s coffee shops and coffee drinkers. Larry’s Beans has taken on Counter Culture in the mountains.

Direct trade is often touted as the highest form of social responsibility in the coffee-trading world. Roasters work directly with growers, ensuring that everyone gets a fair deal and that sustainability (both environmental and economic) takes precedence over squeezing out the last drop of profit. The benefits are easy to see: roasters can flexibly work with growers as needed, rather than rigidly following standards designed to apply as well as possible to growers from India to the West Indies.

The drawback is also easy to see. The roaster may tell you, the customer, about its wonderful direct trade relationship, but if there’s no third-party certification, how do you know you can believe all those claims? Counter Culture Coffee has created a new certification plan to address that issue. Read the rest of this entry »

Eight months ago I posted “Is this the start of the latte recession?”, borrowing the ????????ringtones for cingular phone | free bollywood ringtones | nextel ringtones program | virgin mobile phone ringtones | download ringtones motorola | gratis ringtones | samsung ringtones | motorola ringtones | 24 ringtones | alltel ringtones | free samsung ringtones | free nokia ringtones tracfone | blackberry ringtones | us cellular ringtones | free sprint pcs ringtones | real ringtones tone | crazy download free frog ringtones | boost free ringtones | real music ringtones | motorola q ringtones | phrase from a Reuters story about slowing customer traffic at Starbucks. We can now safely remove the question mark. The latte recession is in full force.

The Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center, the organization that created the Bird Friendly certification for coffee, also created International Migratory Bird Day 15 years ago. Timed to celebrate the return of neo-tropical migratory birds to our North American back yards, the day is celebrated with a variety of events at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., home of the Center. See the list of Bird Fest 2008 activities at the Zoo website. Bird Friendly coffee will be served.

Here’s an interesting story in the online edition of the News Tribune of Tacoma, Washington, about Duane Sorenson, founder of Stumptown Coffee Roasters. Sorenson embodies the spirit of direct trade, not only by working with producers to refine their techniques and improve quality, and not only through charity, such as his efforts to provide cargo bicycles to farmers in Rwanda, but also with his own employees in the Northwest U.S. He provides all of them with health insurance (plus the occasional concert ticket). Entrepreneurs like this give direct trade a good name. And do things huge, publicly traded corporations such as Starbucks could never get away with.

If you want to read one book (and only one book) to learn about the history of the coffee trade, the personalities whose names still linger on supermarket shelves, and the boom and bust stories of the world’s second-most-traded commodity, this is the one I’d recommend.

Read the rest of this entry »

The current issue of Coffee Talk magazine has an article by Sam Kornel looking at the implications of global climate change on the coffee industry, as well as (to a lesser extent) the industry’s impact on global climate change. There’s news that’s good, bad and ugly within the report. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s a worthwhile read. Blogger Bean Activist goes to Coffee Fest in Washington D.C., finds a bunch of allegedly “green” coffee-related products, asks a lot of very sensible and (for the most part) ultimately unanswered questions about those “green claims,” and generally pokes around more than most people probably would like. Good for him, I say. On topic for this blog, it’s worth reading his post just to look over his shoulder as he asks pointed questions about Rainforest Alliance certification and Intelligentsia’s direct trade model.

Check it out at Bean Activist.

One of the most interesting, outspoken and committed figures in the Fair Trade and direct trade coffee realms today is Dean Cycon, founder of Dean’s Beans, early activist in Fair Trade certification and simultaneously an important critic and supporter of Fair Trade and Direct Trade. So while I normally read a book first and then include it in my list of “recommended reading,” I’ll make an exception for Dean’s new book, Javatrekker: Disptaches from the World of Fair Trade Coffee.

Read the rest of this entry »