Small Farmers. Big Change.

By Becca Koganer, Sales Representative “The message is not as simple as telling customers to look for a seal, in fact, quite the opposite.” Recently, I was asked by my brother-in-law to explain something about my professional life that he has never quite understood. A staunch capitalist, he believes that money motivates. How did we [...]

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PRESS RELEASE An Open Letter to Green Mountain Coffee Roasters From Equal Exchange: “Please Leave Fair Trade USA” WEST BRIDGEWATER, MA―May 20, 2012―In a rare business-to-business plea Equal Exchange has released an open letter to Larry Blanford, the CEO of fellow New England specialty coffee company, Green Mountain Coffee Roasters (GMCR) in the form of [...]

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Yesterday you read how Jessie Myszka represented Equal Exchange on a visit with other co-op leaders to the White House to discuss the role of co-operatives in our economy and how our government can better support them. Today, we bring you on another Equal Exchange visit; this time to Peru’s “White House”, or the Presidential [...]

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The following post was written by Jessie Myszka, Director of Support Operations, after her meeting at the White House on May 4th In 2003, while meeting with coffee producers on an Equal Exchange visit to Guatemala, our farmer co-op hosts were proud to show us the power lines that snaked up the mountainside. Electricity had [...]

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From our friends at Fair World Project: Action Alert: Tell Starbucks and Green Mountain to Support Small Fair Trade Farmers! Fair Trade USA  (formerly TransFair USA) and its new initiative, Fair Trade For All,  aims to expand fair trade certification to include coffee plantations.  “Fair Trade for All” has been a major point of contention [...]

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By Hilary Johnson, Equal Exchange Minnesota Office Manager Before I came to Equal Exchange, I spent most of my working life in the produce departments of consumer cooperatives.  I hefted 50-pound cases of potatoes and cabbages, cleaned delicate bunches of cilantro and spinach, and built mountains of broccoli and apples that customers quickly reduced to [...]

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“What is clear and seems to be difficult to understand in the North is that a producer organization can never compete with a large plantation.”  Santiago Paz, Co-Manager, CEPICAFE (The Piuran Coffee Growers Association), Peru “Fair Trade, in Fair Trade USA’s scheme, doesn’t mean anything. In order to increase the market share, they have allowed [...]

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In October 2011, Equal Exchange and Oke USA took a group of produce managers and buyers from food co-operatives in the midwest to northern Peru to visit some of our banana co-op partners and learn more about their lives, co-operative businesses and the bananas they grow and export to us here in the U.S. This [...]

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