Despite my first blog entry, Why “local” and “Equal Exchange Fair Trade” are two sides of the same coin, I must admit that I’m becoming a little confused by some of the Buy Local messaging I’ve been observing lately. I wholeheartedly support the goals of the movement as I understand them to be: reducing our carbon footprint, supporting local farmers, building healthy communities, reducing corporate control of our food system, etc. At the same time, I’m getting more nervous each time I see a simple formulaic solution being offered to resolve complex issues, such as food mile calculators, carbon-neutral labels, 100-mile diets, etc. I worry that if we’re not careful, the Buy Local movement will risk crossing the line that the Fair Trade movement stepped over, when the certifiers began eroding the vitality, richness (and yes, contradictions) woven into Fair Trade by reducing the whole set of values, principles and historical realities into the slogan: “look for the seal.”
We all understand information overload and label fatigue – and far too well. Still, I’d like to believe that there could be a balance between offering consumers salient points to help them make choices; finding opportunities to educate and raise public awareness about issues relating to agriculture, trade and the environment; and patronizing or misleading people by “dumbing-down” complex and difficult issues into simple solutions, formulas, and seals. Worse yet, is when we get stuck in “single-issue thinking” that flattens out the nuances underlying these issues and that has the potential to pit committed activists and community members against one another.
In the Feb. 25th New Yorker article, “Big Foot,” Michael Specter writes about carbon emissions. He comments on some of the efforts different individuals and organizations are grappling with to address the revolutionary changes in behaviors, policies, and laws that need to occur if we are to reverse the dangerous path we’ve been walking with regards to climate change. I really recommend this article to everyone who is trying to alter their behaviors, advocate for changes in governmental laws and push for corporate actions. I won’t try to summarize the article in which he presents a number of interesting new ideas, but suffice it to say, he also discusses half-a-dozen notable examples where due to “…land use, the type of transportation, the weather, or even the season,” buying a locally grown or produced product is not necessarily inherently better for the environment. In fact, in the examples he cites, buying a particular product from another country and transporting it actually turned out to be more environmentally friendly than the option to purchase the product from a local source.
Eric Blair wrote an excellent article in the Charleston City Paper on April 30, 2008, entitled, “The friction between the fair-trade and local-first movements,” in which he presents the views of William Moseley, a geography professor at Macalester College in Minnesota, and Gawain Kripke, the policy director at Oxfam America. They are concerned about what seems to be a growing divide between locavores and Fair Trade enthusiasts. Blair writes:
“Moseley believes fair trade presents a way for small organic farmers and food cooperatives to become economically viable in the face of competition from large-scale plantation farms. He’s seen this while studying a cooperative wine vineyard in South Africa run by about 60 black farmers. The cooperative provides its members with better health care and working conditions than the large-scale owner-operated vineyards and relies on wine exports to break even.”
“In November, Moseley wrote an editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle criticizing the local food movement for being too insular. He did not reject the idea of eating local, but argued that conscientious consumers had to balance localism with an international perspective, one that included understanding our connections to the developing world. The response he received on some websites was openly hostile…”
Gawain Kripke expressed similar views: “It’s important to parse out what the motivations are, and I think there is a worry that the local movement might turn into protectionism or a me-first-ism about our economic relationships, and that could be devastating for poor people in other countries who are really looking for a first step on the economic ladder and trading the things they produce, like agricultural goods, is one of the ways they can improve their livelihoods…”
I’ll leave it to you all to read the two articles in full.
Fair Trade and Buy Local advocates share many important concerns about the ways we can take back our food system so that it works best for small farmers and consumers, as well as care for our planet. Let’s be careful not to create unnecessary wedges between the two movements who at their hearts and souls are trying to achieve the same goals. We need to work together, build one movement, and come up with creative and effective strategies. If not, it will be agribusiness – with their GMO seeds, harmful pesticides, and huge profits, that will continue to dictate how and what we grow, buy, eat… and live.
Small Farmers. Big Change. 
I don’t think there really has to be a mutual exclusivity between fair trade products and buying local. Sure, there is some crossover between the products, but even the fair trade coffee fits more into the “specialty coffee” area. At the same time, they both tackle sustainability issues just in separate geographic regions. The fact that fair trade coffee has a lower footprint than locally grown coffee, even factoring in transportation, tells you a lot about the efficiency and sustainability of cooperative farming compared to industrial agriculture. Both are shifts away from the inefficiencies of industrial agriculture, and should both be embraced depending on product.
what is locally grown coffee? The last I heard, it was not possible to grow coffee in the states….the closest we can get is Hawaii, Mexico, or the Tropics (Jamaica, D.R, Haiti)
I’ve never understood the whole buy local psychology applied to coffee….it all comes from oversees on ships that pollute the ocean, on trucks that pollute the air so what difference does it make whether it’s roasted in Seattle or Florida? It’s already done enough damage just in raw transit.
Obviously this is becoming a major issue for both movements to address . The realities of peak oil and climate change are going to make fair trade even more challenging and make it even more difficult for people in the south to get out of poverty.
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
(On behalf of Phyllis and the rest of us at Equal Exchange)
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
Thanks Brian, Jonathan, and Sol for your interesting comments and Rodney for your informative response to them. I would also like to add that like COCLA, many of the co-operatives we are working with are also trying to diversify their incomes and their diets by using the increased income from Fair Trade to grow organic vegetable gardens and organic orchards. (Most are already growing corn, beans and other basic grains for their families.) The fruit trees are interspersed with the coffee, also increasing the amount of shade. In some cases, the co-ops are involved in animal husbandry projects. The manure is then mixed with the coffee pulp and used as organic fertilizer. Organic herb gardens produce a variety of herbs that are used as natural insecticides.
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.
Rodney, thanks for your reply about farmers dependence on cash crop exports. I’m very impressed with the work of equal exchange and am a big promoter of what people can do through co-ops. I’m curious if there’s been any comparison of fair trade as done through farmer co-ops and fair trade when done through plantations or individual farms in terms of economic diversification at the local level.
To my knowledge no one (in academia, the media, in industry or in the certification world) has provided a side-by-side analysis of the co-op-centered Fair Trade model and the plantation-version Fair Trade model.
While it is true that you can find pieces of the puzzle here and there — such as many studies of particular co-ops who sells into the Fair Trade market or an article or press release about good things happening on Fair Trade certified plantations — I don’t know of any straight up analysis of the two models.
Hmm….I know a couple grad students starting to focus their research into Fair Trade…
While I clearly understand the political importance of bridging different interests to form a more powerful coalition, I don’t buy the “same goals” argument. You could say that George Bush has the same goals in common with many environmentalists and human rights supporters in a number of contexts! Most of the arguments and differences stem in debates over differences in means — not ends.
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.
Thanks for your comments. I have to admit that the tone of the comments felt sufficiently hostile that I went back and reread my post to see which points may have caused you to respond in such a manner. I guess my conclusion is to wonder whether you actually read the post. At any rate, I wish you well…
As a consumer most of the time I have absolutely no idea where the stuff I buy comes from. Fair Trade, Organic and Local produce being slightly better at telling the story than everyday conventional products.
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.
Simon,
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 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