Unfair Trade in Belize - How Kraft Shafts Cocoa Farmers
Posted in: Opinion
Clay,I'm very familiar with the situation with the specific co-op and at least generally familiar with how Fair Trade operates. If you rely on your numbers and figure out the financial impact of each farmer on a percentage basis, you would see that each farmer on average earns an extra 5% from being Fair Trade certified. The fact that the nominal amount is a pittance is another story. Not sure you could really consider that 900 farmers in the coop are actively producing. If so, the average farmer produces less than 100 pounds of beans a year. My guess is that only a third are active so the financial impact is threefold.As you acknowledged, the Toledo Cacao Grower's Association (TCGA) is a market maker. Without them, farmers would have no one to sell to. Who would spend the time aggregating the crops of hundreds of farmers and arranging for shipment to an international buyer if not the TCGA? These farmers are Fair Trade certified because it is part of the marketing of Green & Black's Chocolate (TCGA's primary buyer) and therefore a requirement of the product.If you think about it from this perspective, it's almost like a union job. Sure, some unions may waste their member's money, but the member has a job that otherwise wouldn't be available. In this case the farmer is better off selling a Fair Trade product than not selling at all.I do agree that the amounts charged by the Fair Trade Labeling Organizations are exorbitant; a direct trade model makes more sense. Perhaps if Green & Black's/Kraft and the TCGA gave up on Fair Trade labeling, each entity could pass that much more on to the farmers.Jeff