The human predilection for sugar is one of our most essential characteristics. When we talk about truly enjoying life, it often boils down to eating dessert first. As a commodity, sugar is an important agricultural product. Because it is derived from both sugar cane and sugar beet, it can be produced in a range of climates, including parts of the U.S. If you purchase fair trade sugar, you are almost certainly buying crystals made from sugar cane grown in South America.

Harvesting

Sugar represents a massive percentage of the global food ingredient trade. As with bananas, the sugar industry in the U.S. is consolidated among a small number of corporations, so transitioning farmers to fair trade means involving some large, mainstream companies in reshaping the supply chain.

Paraguay has been one of the largest fair trade sugar suppliers to the U.S. since 2006.  The country ships 45 percent of its national sugar production to America and comprises more than 85 percent of all of the U.S.'s fair trade sugar imports. Other fair trade sugar import countries include Malawi, the Phillippines, and Costa Rica.

Selling

Companies that make everything from ice cream to iced tea are eager to align their brands with a more sustainable image and are helping to boost the demand for fair trade ingredients in other markets. In Mexico and Belize, organizations have been recruiting conventional sugar farmers to take up fair trade practices in order to meet the demand.

Recruitment generally involves engaging farmers in long term contracts that give them the reassurance that they’ll get a good price for their product over time, even in the event of market fluctuations. The additional benefits of health care, education and community improvement go a long way toward convincing farmers that this is a good alternative to the conventional way of running their operations. Typically, small farmers have no bargaining power or even access to market information that would allow them to negotiate according to industry fluctuations. The low prices farmers are able to secure during the short sugar cane harvesting season are often not enough for most to sustain their farms or even a livelihood for their families and communities.

But with the additional funds made from fair trade labeling, one Paraguayan sugar co-operative was able to repair a bridge and acquire heavier equipment including a tractor and trucks to improve production efficiency and boost worker productivity.

Distribution

The majority of fair trade sugar comes to us as packaged sugar or as an ingredient in pre-made consumer foods like chocolate and candy, canned drinks, ice cream, and jams.

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Image 1 (cc) from Flickr user Public Domain Photos

Image 2 (cc) from Flickr user kmacelwee

Raw cocao beans

After coffee, chocolate is likely the product most responsible for raising awareness of fair trade. With bars from companies like Green & Blacks, which is now owned by Kraft Foods, appearing almost as ubiquitously as an average Snickers, the fair trade label is a common sight at the checkout counter.

Harvesting

Most cacao found in chocolate products is grown in West Africa and Latin America. As with coffee, cacao is a product that requires several steps of processing before it is ready for consumption and sale—it must be dried, fermented, and almost always mixed with sweeteners and other ingredients. Some small scale cacao farmers conduct these processes themselves, but most sell their raw beans to the next link in the chain.

Child labor is a fairly common issue in the cacao industry, and fair trade regulations focus significant attention on supporting the need to teach children how to farm, while ensuring there’s no forced or dangerous labor, and that kids are still getting access to adequate school education, including safe transportation to and from school, and the books and uniforms they require.

Selling

In West Africa, cacao often holds a high market value but independent, small-scale farmers struggle to get a fair price for their raw product, and even face physical dangers when transporting their beans to processors. Having a cooperative that can protect and support the farmers is key to promoting fairness all the way to the beginning of the supply chain. Cooperatives often organize crop pickups, taking a truck from farm to farm and sparing growers the risk of being harmed or cheated.

Only licensed buyers can purchase cacoa from the farmer cooperatives. At the point of sale, fair trade standards stipulate that an elected recorder, who is also a farmer, be present to weigh the product and make sure the grower gets paid immediately, not issued an IOU or told to come back for payment, as frequently happens in the conventional system. The farmer must be paid a fair trade floor price or the market price, whichever is higher at the time of sale.

The cooperative also facilitates decisions around how fair trade premiums are spent. In West Africa, premiums sometimes go toward village improvements like a nearby water well, which allows young girls to attend school, instead of spending the day gathering water.

While fair trade chocolate makes up a tiny portion of the total chocolate market, it has found a niche with specialty and boutique chocolate makers. With the numerous mission-driven, socially-minded entrepreneurs digging into the cacao business, there are dozens of companies working to produce all kinds of organic, fair trade chocolate.

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Image 1 from Fair Trade USA

Image 2 (cc) from Flickr user John Loo

Bananas are one of the most widely consumed fruits on earth, eaten in many parts of the world as a starch, not a fruit, and therefore a staple element of basic diets. The banana industry is one of the more notorious in the global food trade for its historic mistreatment of plantation workers and for the relative monopoly that a handful of multinational corporations hold. In 2008, journalist Dan Koeppel published a book entitled Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World, in which he revealed many of the troubling aspects of banana production and trade, including the agricultural narrowing process that has led to the cultivation of just one variety—the Cavendish banana—which is now at great risk of being wiped out in one fell swoop if a disease strikes plantation regions. The rise of fair trade practices and organic growing has the potential to redeem certain aspects of the banana industry, but just how much effect it will have depends on consumer demand.

Harvesting

Bananas are the most consumed fruit in the world. They are affordable, full of potassium, available any season, and conveniently pre-packaged. They are also one of the most controversial agricultural products of our day, laden with a history of colonialism and human exploitation. Today, bananas are grown both on large plantations and small holder farms that measure under five acres. Fair trade certified bananas can come from both types of farms, and the Fair Trade Labeling Organizations International (FLO) has established separate standards for the two.

One of the major issues on banana farms that fair trade aims to tackle is child labor. On family farms, children are often taught to treat and harvest plants at a young age, but the work can be extremely dangerous, both because of the use of chemical pesticides and the need for machetes to chop down heavy clusters of fruit and the trees themselves, which only produce one bunch of fruit in their lifetime. In addition, employing children on the farm means keeping them out of school.

Fair trade standards address these issues in direct and indirect ways—directly, they prohibit the use of certain pesticides and herbicides even on non-organic bananas; indirectly, price premiums for community development enable adult farmers to earn more so that their children can go to school. Fair trade also works to mitigate damage to native vegetation—a challenge on single-crop plantations. With the additional earnings and training that come through fair trade, farmers are enabled to cultivate bananas in more biologically diverse and wild setting, which contributes to ecological preservation.

Selling

While fair trade organizations often try to support smaller players in the market, bananas are one instance in which working with the mainstream corporate players has been a necessary step in keeping the fair trade banana market viable in the U.S. The “big three” —Dole, Chiquita and Del Monte—own many of the plantations in Central and South America, and small, independent banana farms are bound to sell into the corporate supply chain in order to get their product to market.

Bananas are sold by the box, rather than by weight, with around 40 pounds of fruit inside. Each box of fair trade bananas carries a premium of around $1 for community reinvestment. The cardboard boxes themselves, as well as the plastic bags into which banana clusters are wrapped straight from the tree, represent a significant additional cost to the grower. For this reason, bananas in particular are a business that depends on scale—large producers can procure materials at a cheaper price, while small producers are stuck paying high prices in order to sell their goods in the same condition as the big players.

Shipping/Distribution

Because bananas have a relatively short shelf life compared to coffee, tea or sugar, shipping is a very important phase of the supply chain, and the small producers have little choice but to go through the large shipping channels to get their bananas to the consumer in a timely manner. Various technologies and chemicals have been engineered in order to build in some leeway by slowing the ripening process and adding a few weeks to the stretch from farm to retail.

The ripening of a commercial banana is a stop-and-start process. Ethylene, the organic chemical that triggers ripening, is the enemy of long shipping journeys. Refrigerated cargo containers are generally sprayed with chemicals that inhibit the fruit’s natural production of ethylene. Once the bananas reach the distribution facility, workers drench them in ethylene to restart ripening so that the fruit begins to turn from green to yellow as it reaches the market and, eventually, your kitchen.

Image 1 (cc) by Flickr user Agapfel

Image 2 from Fair Trade USA

One of the oldest beverages in the world, tea is the most widely consumed drink in the world, second only to water. In America, it's not quite as popular as coffee, but its become a fast growing segment in the beverage market. Tea leaves are all plucked from the camellia sinensis tree and different kinds—black, oolong, green—come from different varieties of this bush. And sorry de-caf fans, but herbal teas from flowers and herbs (like chrysanthemum, ginger, and rooibos) are technically not teas at all, but herbal (or "tisane") infusions.

For centuries, the insatiable demand for tea in the West resulted in widespread trading and importing practices that gave little regard to quality control, fair compensation to purveyors, and worse, the human rights of workers. Today, Fair Trade-certified tea is helping to protect tea leaf quality and the basic rights for those who produce them. Here's how it works:

Harvesting

With coffee, most fair trade farmers operate their own small family farms within a cooperative network of other small producers, but tea is still commonly produced on large plantations where workers are hired laborers rather than shareholders or owners. For tea workers, one key provision under Fair Trade standards is adequate understanding of labor rights. Workers are supposed to be assured not only a fair wage for cultivating and harvesting tea, but also training in filing grievances in the event of unjust or unsafe conditions. Fair Trade also stipulates a worker representation model in which employees have their own elected body of advocates who work with plantation managers to enforce the standards. Approximately half of the Fair Trade tea sold in the US is also certified organic, but tea that is not organic is grown with a hefty amount of pesticides, which can add to the list of health problems workers encounter.

Selling

As with other Fair Trade products, tea carries a premium that is to be reinvested into community development according to the needs of the community from which it comes. In the case of tea, the premiums often go toward supporting elderly workers through retirement plans, pensions and heath care. Because many young people now migrate into urban areas to find more lucrative work, Fair Trade works simultaneously to create a safety net for elderly farmers and a better incentive for younger generations to work in agriculture and remain near their families, many of whom occupy housing on the plantations.

Shipping/Distribution

Most tea comes from China, South Asia and Africa. A tea bag labeled Fair Trade must contain 100 percent fair trade-grown tea leaves, though products that combine tea with other ingredients, such as chai mixes, can contain non-fair trade ingredients and still carry the label.

Image 1 (cc) from Flickr user Raphael Fauveau

Image 2 (cc) from Flickr user luvjnx

While it’s fairly common to see the Fair Trade label on coffee due thanks to pureveyors like Starbucks, Fair Trade coffee makes up only four percent of all coffee sold in the U.S. There are numerous labels found on coffee today—organic, shade-grown, even bird-friendly. None of these are required by Fair Trade coffee but they often go hand-in-hand, with farmers offered an incentive to transition their farms to organic production. Today nearly 50 percent of fair trade coffee imports are also organic, and all fair trade certified coffee is free of GMOs as well as a select list of chemical pesticides.

Harvesting

Fair Trade farmers only pick coffee berries that are fully ripe—what they call the “red cherries”—which ensures that they are sending the highest quality into the supply chain and specialty coffee market. Limiting their yield to what’s perfectly ripe requires picking by hand, requiring several passes around the tree for every viable berry to be plucked. This is time-consuming and laborious, and can’t be done by a machine. So if you’re paying a little extra to drink a Fair Trade cup, those additional cents are going in part to compensation for the physical work of the workers.

In conventional coffee farming, the berries are often mechanically harvested or stripped from the tree in a single pass, which pulls berries at various stages of ripeness, along with twigs and other agricultural trimmings that ultimately get separated from the berries and discarded. Unripe berries that come off during this process also get tossed, so these sweeping harvest methods must be done when most of the coffee is as ripe as possible, to maximize the yield.

Selling

Most coffee-growing regions use a cash-based economy. For farmers acting independently in the free market, the need for cash between harvests often forces them to sell beans for pennies on the dollar to a buyer—often referred to as a coyote—who will then turn around and sell it at a higher price at market.

The Fair Trade standard sets a floor price for coffee that dictates the minimum a farmer must be paid for their crop if the end product is to be labeled Fair Trade. If the market price of coffee is higher than the floor price, the farmers gets the market price, but if the market price falls, the farmer is still entitled to the floor price, establishing protection against steep market fluctuations.

Fair Trade farmers are also organized into cooperatives, allowing them access to credit on the international market. Traditionally, coffee farmers are paid just once per year at harvest time, so the ability to gain credit means they can sustain their families more consistently throughout the year.

Shipping/Distribution

Where the product crosses over from its origin country into its destination country, there can be a significant power imbalance on the two sides of a sale negotiation. Shipping operators don't always act in the interest of their source, and might sell products outside of Fair Trade parameters, breaking a link in the fair supply chain.

One key aspect of the fair trade standard is traceability. From the farm to the retail shelf, there’s a paper trail at each stage of the supply chain. Importers and exporters are included in this chain, so shipping companies are also held to the expectation of fair prices being paid to sellers at the product origin.

When the beans reach roasters, brands, manufacturers or retailers, they pay a community development premium that goes back to the farmer cooperative and gets invested in social benefit initiatives including community infrastructure improvements, education programs, and local health care. The members of the coop vote to decide on how this premium gets invested, to ensure it’s the most appropriate use of funds for that community.

Images 1 and 2 from Fair Trade USA

Image 3 (cc) from Flickr user sarahemcc

This post is in partnership with Ben & Jerry's

 

A collaboration between GOOD and Bradley R. Hughes, in partnership with Ben & Jerry's.