You’re right that while labels tell you something, sometimes it might only be the beginning.

On this I have some big picture-type thoughts, as well as some nuts & bolts information.

Big Picture:
Labels do help fill in the picture, especially for the millions of time-starved folks who want to shop, cook and eat consciously. (Interestingly, the proliferation of labels has itself spawned a small cottage industry of folks trying to explain the labels that explain the food. More on that later.)

But even with this added info one can probe deeper – which we at Equal Exchange strongly encourage and try in our own humble way to facilitate.

If you’re worried about the more processed foods, and all that goes into them (meaning both the many ingredients, and each ingredient’s own complex supply chain) then one step you might take is Michael Pollan’s advice and try to avoid such foods in the first place. I find that that alone goes a good ways towards “cleaning” up my shopping list and cupboard.

Nuts & bolts:
Here’s one example of labels falling short of expectations:
In the U.S. you could see a Ben & Jerry’s tub of vanilla ice cream with the Fair Trade seal and you’d reasonably assume that all the major ingredients were fairly traded and certified as such – just as with the Fair Trade coffee & cocoa & sugar that maybe you also buy.
But you’d be wrong. (No surprise here, but there’s fine print involved that would, theoretically, clarify the matter. Yet still its only the fine print, and not the “headline”, of the Fair Trade seal that most Fair Trade shoppers actually go by.)

In fact, in this ice cream neither of the major ingredients – cream & sugar – are actually fairly traded. Only a trace ingredient, the vanilla, is. Kinda misleading don’t you think? This is especially unfortunate as there is Fair Trade sugar available for B & J to use. In fact, in Britain, Ben & Jerry’s DOES use Fair Trade sugar in their ice cream. (While US import restrictions to protect the sugar industry _might_ explain part of this paradox it does not explain the decision to allow the use of the Fair Trade seal on a product with so little Fair Trade content.)

Similarly the Ben & Jerry’s Fair Trade Certified chocolate ice cream uses FT cocoa, but not FT sugar (by weight a much more important ingredient). Also, the corporate Fair Trade Certified chocolate and cocoa on the market (eg Dagoba – owned by Hershey’s, and Green & Black – owned by Cadbury-Schwepps) also uses FT cocoa but not FT sugar.

In contrast, Equal Exchange, and our FT allies, Cocoa Camino and Divine Chocolate, DO use FT sugar for their many cocoa and chocolate products.

In like fashion, the cardamom used for our new fairly traded chai comes from SOFA in Sri Lanka, one of the same Fair Trade Certified farmer co-ops that provide us with organic FT black and green tea.

Other resources:
At http://www.transfairusa.org/content/Downloads/certification/CompositeProductPolicy.pdf“> TransFair USA you can read the fine print of what is required for use of the Fair Trade seal for “composite” products like chocolate and ice cream.

As for parsing the utility of other labels (some useful, some positively misleading) I recommend the ”Eco-label Center” of Consumer Reports. They assessed the validity and objectivity of 100+ labels you might see in the grocery or hardware store.

Lastly, I’d recommend the book Eating Between the Lines that offers approx. 300 pages on how to interpret all the labels out there.

Rodney, Equal Exchange

Labeling is appalling in most cases, and even when I ask questions directly of retailers and producers I rarely get the information I would like.

For simple products like fruit and veg and coffee with relatively little processing its simple enough to pass along information to the consumer so that they can make a choice, but for complex multi production stage, multi ingredient products its a nightmare.

What portion of something makes it local, what portion of it makes it Fairtrade etc. I recently bought some shampoo labeled as containing fairly traded organic ingredients. Looking at the ingredients list, it seemed to be a tiny tiny proportion of the ingredients… and where did they come from, and when and how etc…

We have little idea.

One day I dream we’ll have more access to this information and it will be expected that it will be provided.

And I personally resent the idea that anyone with a form of social or environmental empathy has to subscribe to some monolithic order requiring one to sign up for a combination platter of causes. For example, for 16 years I’ve felt Fair Trade was always well-intended but a failure in execution until something better comes along (thank you, Direct Trade). And I’m not about to change my opinion on that in order to support environmental causes, and I’m not willing to forgo those environmental causes to rail against the problems of Fair Trade. It cannot be an all or nothing deal.

The monolithic “green” is a myth. It creates a tyranny of opinion and does not allow for the fact that many people find some issues to be bogus and yet can wholly support other causes that may be inconveniently packaged together. Let’s not create stereotypes and stifle debate in the name of selling out our opinions on the issues.

And so, to address jonathan’s point: while it is true that there is a carbon footprint associated with the shipping of coffee, the farmers we work with are also doing a considerable amount of reforestation work, soil and water conservation, erosion prevention, etc. that is making a positive ecological contribution. You can read more about these efforts on the Nicaragua, Colombia, and South Africa pages of the blog.

Sol is right to be thinking about farmers dependence upon export crops in the first place, and what is being done to encourage the production of crops for local consumption.

At Equal Exchange the founders entered the coffee business 22 years ago with the pretty basic assumptions that people were going to drink coffee, and others were going to grow it, and that EE could do something to make the transactions in between more direct, fair and sustainable. I think those are still reasonable assumptions – meaning there’s plenty of work to be done in partnership with the millions of farmers growing export crops.

But with that said, I think it’s interesting and heartening that a consistent benefit from Fair Trade has been how farmer co-ops have often used the extra income from Fair Trade to diversify their farms and grow more food for themselves or for sale within their own country. For example, the COCLA co-op in Peru, a top coffee exporter, started a bread baking operation that created many jobs, provides fresh bread for their communities as well additional income for the co-op. The extra income from Fair Trade helped to make the necessary investments possible.

More broadly efforts to focus more on farming for local consumption (instead of for export) could be said to be part of the expanding “food sovereignty movement”. Two great groups – Grassroots International – and Via Campesino are great resources for learning more about what is being done in that regard. See: http://grassrootsonline.org and http://www.viacampesino.org

Re: the Greenheart project. I don’t think any of us here had heard about it. It’s an intriguing, and ambitious idea – kind of like Fair Trade coffee was way back in the mid-80′s, meaning anythings possible.

One of its biggest hurdles will be cost. For all the drawbacks of the world’s modern container cargo ships, they can deliver a pound of organic Fair Trade coffee from Peru to NY city for about 15 cents. Which allows that coffee to remain within the economic reach of a sufficient number of US coffee drinkers. Also, while modern cargo ships are not pristine their sheer size enables them to transport a pound of coffee, etc., with a smaller ecological impact per mile than any other form of transportation, even trains.

Given the scale of the Greenheart ships they would have a crew ½ the size of a container ship but carry only 1/1000th the amount of cargo, making them therefore possibly 500 times more expensive to operate for each pound of delivered freight, and therefore probably not feasible for bulky low value cargo like coffee or other Fair Trade goods.

With that said many people are finally beginning to look at ways to tackle the carbon & pollution footprints of modern ocean-shipping. See this summary at: http://www.go-green.com/node/198

One of my worries with fair trade production is the continuing dependence that the world poorest farmers have on being able to export their crops, and the risk they face is amplified when they are producing single, non-sustenance crops, like coffee. I’m curious about movements akin to our “eat local” movements (I’m in Canada) that are happening in the developing world to encourage food production for local consumption.

I remember sitting around a campfire at the home of some Mexican farm workers in Baja. They were remarking on the irony of how they had to buy potatoes in their local store that came from the USA, while their people worked on farms owned by foreign companies to grow potatoes to ship to the USA.

As a side note, has anyone heard of the Greenheart project? They are building a sailing/cargo vessel that will travel around the world transporting fair trade goods using only the clean energy from the wind and sun. http://www.greenheartproject.org/project.html