Fair Price For Producers With Fair Trade Organic Coffee

The idea of fair trade organic coffee is a good one. With coffee industry profits second only to the oil industry, it's hard to fight big conglomerates, but the fair trade movement has tried.

Often farmers who produce coffee barely live at a subsistence level because big corporations don't pay fair prices. So many farmers have banded together into co-ops, negotiating for that fair price and providing a better living.

The certified fair trade product is often also produced with more organic farming methods, so it's better for the land, the farmers and even the taste of the coffee.

One reason why some doubt that fair trade coffee will survive the entry of big corporations into the movement is that these companies retain the same motives for consolidating everything into a huge organization that will short-change the smaller farmer all over again.

Whatever a large organization has to do to squeeze out the last penny of profit, it tends to do no matter what smaller player is hurt. Fair trade organic coffee may end up just the same old coffee under a new name, unless corporations change their own motivations and inner workings.

The push for fair trade organic coffee is part of the wider movement for fair trade food and other products. The aim is for the producers of products to be given a fair price for what they produce, rather than be pressured to live at subsistence level so end users in a more prosperous country can consume the product really cheaply.

That arrangement, as promoted by mega corporations, amounts to little more than slavery or a sort of feudalism. It's not yet clear whether those same mega corporations can now enter the fair trade movement without pushing everything back into the same kind of feudal system.

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