Mara Fridell

With Friends Like These: The Corporate Response to Fair Trade Coffee

Capitalist agriculture is highly exploitative of both producers and the environment. Fair trade is a movement attempting to mitigate this exploitation, partly by baiting corporate actors into the arena of “ethical production.” In the coffee industry, major corporations are responding by discrediting fair trade and branding themselves as ethical. While falling well short of addressing the real demands of the movement, the proliferation of “ethical” labels resulting from this response threatens to destroy fair trades own ethical brand.

Fair trade, sustainability, and social change

1. Things and What They Hide 2. Car Trunks to Shipping Containers 3. The Persistence of Poverty 4. Free Riding and the Fairness Frame 5. Power and Consumption: Corporate Countermovement and the Threat of Asymmetry 6. W(h)ither, Fair Trade? Afterword: Fair Trade in A Boom Market

Out of our inner city backyards: re-scaling urban environmental health inequity assessment.

In this paper, we report the results of a three-year research project (2008-2011) that aimed to identify urban environmental health inequities using a photography-mediated qualitative approach adapted for comparative neighbourhood-level assessment. The project took place in Vancouver, Toronto, and Winnipeg, Canada and involved a total of 49 inner city community researchers who compared environmental health conditions in numerous neighbourhoods across each city. Using the social determinants of health as a guiding framework, community researchers observed a wide range of differences in health-influencing private and public spaces, including sanitation services, housing, parks and gardens, art displays, and community services. The comparative process enabled community researchers to articulate in five distinct ways how such observable conditions represented system level inequities. The findings inform efforts to shift environmental health intervention from constricted action within derelict urban districts to more coordinated mobilization for health equity in the city.

The Persistence of Poverty

The most fundamental goal of fair trade is to improve the lives of developing-world producers. If it fails in this goal, the rest of the project is completely immaterial. In fact, if developed-world consumers were paying

Things and What They Hide

12 for a bag of coffee that failed to improve the social and environmental conditions for coffee growers, the whole project should undoubtedly be abandoned. Fair trade promotional literature is littered with anecdotes about how fair trade transformed producers’ lives from those of destitution and hopelessness to survival and optimism. These testimonials are from the former TransFair USA site: The fair price is a solution. It has given us the chance to pay a good price to our farmers. Those who are not in Fair Trade want to participate. For us it is a great opportunity. It gives us hope. —Benjamin Cholotio Thanks to the Fair Trade market, our standard of living has substantially increased. With your support, we look forward to a more promising future. —Miguel Trigoso, Marketing Manager, APARM coffee

W(h)ither Fair Trade

On April 1, 2008, as part of their ‘Earth Month’ marketing campaign, Walmart stores rolled out their very own Fair Trade CertifiedTM coffee. The press release, sub-titled ‘Retailer Answers Coffee Drinkers’ Demands for Guilt-Free Gourmet Taste,’ read: ‘Bolstering Walmart’s ongoing commitment to environmental issues, these first Sam’s Choice brand coffees… are part of an Earth Month expansion of eco-friendly products that help consumers live better without compromising budget.’ They further reported that the new coffees (including not just a fair trade option but also a brand certified by the Rainforest Alliance, and a United States Department of Agriculture [USDA]-certified organic blend) were all roasted by the world’s first CarbonNeutral® coffee roaster.

Free Riding and the Fairness Frame

Like a good magician, the commodity attracts attention to the end product while distracting people from the often grim reality of how it was produced. As consumer culture adds additional layers of meaning to commodities and the physical distance between production and consumption is increased, the illusion that shrouds both social and environmental conditions has become all the more difficult to detect.

Power and Consumption: Corporate Countermovement and the Threat of Asymmetry

It is Christmas 2008. Despite the economic turmoil of falling stock markets and rising unemployment, people are busy trying to purchase gifts for those they care about or for whom they are obligated to buy. In a slight contrast to the annual tradition of expressing affection in well-wrapped commodity form, TransFair USA entreats Christmas shoppers who stop by their web site to ‘Give gifts of fairness for the holidays.’ It is obviously not actual fairness (however that is defined) that is being given by gift donations of

Afterword: Fair Trade in a Boom Market

25 for a coffee shade tree, but TransFair USA’s holiday offering does highlight some interesting questions about fair trade.

Car Trunks to Shipping Containers

In the fall of 2005, Nestle in the United Kingdom announced with great fanfare, the launch of a new brand of soluble coffee, Partners Blend. In its press release, carried by major media outlets around the world, the company boasted, ‘This represents a fundamental, serious commitment to help some of the poorest farmers in the world’ (BBC News 2005). This declaration of corporate responsibility, and the accompanying statement of approval from the Fairtrade Foundation, was very valuable for Nestle, one of the most boycotted companies in the world. For years, Nestle’s corporate behavior has made it easy for activists to portray it as a rapacious exploiter of both workers and consumers in the Third World. Most famously, it marketed instant milk as a superior substitute to breast feeding in the developing world, a move that justifiably angeredmany who argued, correctly, that it was less nutritious than breast milk and obviously more expensive. Worse, Nestle was aware of the instant milk’s nutritional inferiority yet continued with the strategy (Sikkink 1986). Nestle’s unethical corporate image did not sit well for a company trying to market family-friendly foods. This negative image was reinforced by the growing awareness among consumers of the poverty and environmental damage that was part and parcel of the conventional coffee industry.