Small Farmers. Big Change.

by Rodney North, The Answer Man, Equal Exchange

In the past we’ve tried to explain why we’ve invested so much to create a Fair Trade supply chain with co-operatives of small-scale tea growers. We’ve been trying to make the case that Fair Trade tea sourced from large plantations (which is normally the case for the Fair Trade tea you find in grocery stores) does not represent a substantive model for economic change or social justice, and that it falls short of the goals that have long inspired the Fair Trade movement.

But thankfully you don’t have to just take our word for it. Recently Grist.org Senior Food & Ag Editor and blogger extraordinaire, Tom Philpott, took a look at the Fair Trade tea scene and came to a similar conclusion.  With help from Dan Kane and a like-minded post from the WorldWatch Institute Tom used his January 18 post to offer an overview of the reality in Darjeeling, India, source of much of the world’s best tea and of much of its Fair Trade certified tea. After considering the facts he, too, found that small farmer co-ops are integral if you’re to make Fair Trade tea meaningful.

Unhappily, simply buying tea labeled Fair Trade doesn’t much affect conditions on the ground in Darjeeling, either. According to Kane, “Even those plantations labeled as Fair Trade by the Fair Trade Labeling Organization (FLO) and receive a premium price for their product rarely pass on these profits to laborers.”

To me, this is devastating. Even Western consumers who try to do the right thing by buying Fair Trade are financing ecological damage and poverty cycles in Darjeeling.

But even as Kane shows that the conventional trade model as well as its Fair Trade variant is failing on many important fronts in Darjeeling, he also points to an alternative: a cooperative project started by families who took over a tea plantation abandoned when the British left India in 1947. For decades, Kane writes, they shunned the global tea market and supported themselves through subsistence agriculture. Then 10 years ago, with the help of NGOs, they formed a dairy cooperative called Sanjukta Vikas Cooperative (SVC) to sell milk locally. Later, they revived the old tea bushes and began to produce organic tea, marketed in the United States by Massachusetts-based Equal Exchange under a Fair Trade label.

Unlike other Fair Trade situations, this one distributes the rewards of the higher retail price widely, Kane reports. Profits have already been invested in schools and women’s health clinics. Most crucially of all, the cooperative is hinged on polyculture and economic diversity, not monoculture and specialization.

Tom also goes on to give more insights into how this particular Equal Exchange partner is using their new and improved market access to strengthen their community economically and ecologically.

These farmers have turned their involvement in the global tea trade into hard assets: schools, clinics, and food-production infrastructure. If the price of tea plunges — all commodity markets are subject to volatility based on the whims of distant traders as well as random weather events — they’ll still be able to produce food for themselves and their neighbors to eat. (Plantation owners who devote all their land to monocropped tea, by contrast, would be ruined by a prolonged slump in tea prices — and their workers would be devastated.) And in addition to building economic resiliency, the SVC farmers are also building ecological resiliency, by not resorting to monocrops and agrichemicals.

At the end Tom puts the example of our work with this one co-op into the really big geo-political picture and, thankfully, concludes:

Until policy changes, it’s likely that projects like Sanjukta Vikas will remain the tiny exception to a monstrous rule. But that just means that conscientious U.S. consumers with the means to do so should ramp up their efforts to identify such projects and pay up for their products.

A meeting of Equal Exchange representatives and members of the Sanjukta Vikas Co-operative, Darjeeling, India, November 2010