Why Not a Full Commitment to Fair Trade?

by Zarah Patriana · 2008-11-07 18:17:00 UTC
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In discussing the Starbucks' decision with Dean Cycon of Dean's Beans, he brought up an issue in his response that I had been wondering myself. Dean had thrown out the question to Starbucks: Why aren't you ninety or one hundred percent Fair Trade? I asked the same question to my friend when I first heard the news about Starbucks and he offered the response that if Starbucks was all Fair Trade, then it would potentially make it harder for smaller Fair Trade coffee companies to compete. That conclusion left me with an unsettling feeling, so I asked Dean to offer his take on it. Here was his response:

Since my early days as a Founder of Coffee Kids in the late 1980's, I have always asked the question "what would it be like if coffee companies simply paid a fair price for all of their beans?  I have never met a farmer who said he or she would be hurt by receiving a higher price for a terribly underpriced commodity.  Besides a few wacky right wing faux-economists, nobody in their right mind can make an argument how paying somebody what their labor and product is worth can be harmful.  The only thing that would suffer if Starbucks went seriously Fair Trade is their egregious profit margin.  Starbucks is currently closing underperforming stores. What they fail to tell people is that their definition of underperforming is a store that has less than a twenty percent profit margin.  In other words, they are closing stores and firing people in situations many of us would be happy to be in from a profit point of view.  Starbucks is so overly concerned with uber-profit that it blinds them to taking any real responsibility for what they actually do on the ground and in the lives of the farmers.  Starbucks is the coffee industry's version of Lehman Brothers.

What is stopping Starbucks from going 100% Fair Trade? What argument can be made against offering coffee farmers a fair wage for the labor that they put into their work? Anyone from Starbucks want to answer that?

[image credit Jasmin Chua, at www.worstedwitch.com]

Zarah Patriana
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