Posts Tagged ‘Sustainability’

Beyond Fair Trade

Monday, June 15th, 2009

As Catholic Relief Services expands its work with small-holder coffee farmers, we’re learning more and more about the benefits and limitations of certification systems and returning to the question of how to make coffee the means to a sustainable livelihood for coffee farmers. Our fully-committed partners on the CRS Coffee Project demonstrate it is possible to have a direct relationship with coffee cooperatives and negotiate a fair trading terms. However, are the various certification systems, including Fair Trade, that fall under the category of sustainable coffees actually producing a sustainable livelihood for small-holder coffee farmers? Michael Sheridan, former program manager of the CRS Fair Trade program in the U.S. and current Regional Technical Advisor on Livelihoods in CRS’ Latin America and the Caribbean office, tackles this issue in the May 2009 edition of InterAction’s  Monday Developments Magazine.

Thanks to our friends at InterAction for permission to share Michael’s article below:

BEYOND FAIR TRADE: FROM SUSTAINABLE COFFEES TO SUSTAINABLE LIVELIHOODS
Michael Sheridan, May 2009

Fair Trade has been one of the most celebrated concepts in social entrepreneurship over the past decade. Its explosive growth has been fueled in part by the Fair Trade campaigns of InterAction members. At Catholic Relief Services (CRS), we have increasingly invested in Fair Trade and other “sustainable” coffees.  We supported farmer organizations overseas in their efforts to access Fair Trade and organic coffee markets while also promoting the Fair Trade label at home. I was personally involved in these efforts, directing the CRS Fair Trade Program in the U.S. for nearly four years before relocating to Guatemala.

Here, I supervise our CAFE Livelihoods, an $8.2 million project to strengthen farmers’ engagement with high-value coffee markets. We believe Fair Trade and organic certifications represent the best hope for the largest number of farmers to maximize their coffee income, create sustainable grassroots enterprises, and farm in ecologically sustainable ways.

In recent years, however, Fair Trade has been criticized for failing to foster sustainable rural development. The purpose of this piece is not to adjudicate the claims of Fair Trade’s advocates and critics. Instead, I want to focus on three points concerning the ongoing conversation about sustainability in coffee.

First, the debates over the relative merits of Fair Trade and other certifications miss the larger point. None of the competing coffee certifications, either individually or in combination, can ensure truly sustainable smallholder livelihoods. Second, future discussions of coffee sustainability within the industry, development field and
donor community should apply the concept of sustainability to the livelihoods of the smallholder farmers who grow the majority of the world’s coffee. These discussions should center on a holistic vision of sustainability generated on the ground, in coffee growing countries, and not around the narrower standards of certification systems developed in the U.S. and Europe. Finally, the industry, donors and development agencies must invest more in critical issues that lie beyond the coffee chain but threaten the livelihoods of coffee farmers and put the chain itself at risk.

Fair trade and rural livelihoods under pressure
Fair Trade is concerned primarily with improving the terms of trade for smallholder farmers. Over the past decade, it has mitigated price risk and volatility for these farmers by fostering longerterm trading relationships with guaranteed
minimum prices above prevailing market rates. It is a worthy accomplishment. But the primary issue that Fair Trade Certification addresses—unfavorable terms of trade—is only one of the increasing threats to fragile smallholder livelihoods, and not necessarily the most urgent.

Perhaps the most significant limitation of coffee certification schemes in improving smallholder livelihoods concerns
the volume of coffee that smallholders produce. While coffee represents the most significant agricultural activity for most smallholder farmers, it is not the only one. Most also devote a significant portion of their land to other crops. So
even if farmers can sell all their coffee at premium prices— and few are so lucky—the low volume of coffee traded may
limit coffee’s contribution to their overall well-being. And the decreasing size of many small farms due to inheritance and subdivision is only intensifying the pressure on the land and livelihoods.

These vulnerabilities are exacerbated by global shocks like the food price crisis, long-term trends like climate change,
and the constant threat of natural disaster. Collectively, these challenges make smallholder coffee farmers highly susceptible to even the mildest ecological or economic pressure.

In this context, it seems almost unreasonable to expect coffee certification to make much headway. In fact, evidence suggests that even small-scale coffee farmers who sell shadegrown, Fair Trade and organic coffee may be going hungry for as many as four to six months per year.

To cope with economic stress, smallholder farmers turn to short-term strategies that undermine their long-term wellbeing. They buy and eat less food, withdraw children from school, spend less on health care, sell coffee at a fraction of its value, clear-cut forests to sell timber and grow higher-yield crops, take out loans they will struggle to repay, sell
household and productive assets, and leave for longer periods to work elsewhere.

These strategies compromise their future ability to produce large volumes of high-quality coffee. A hungry farmer works less effectively than a well-fed one. A farmer who is away from his fields for months earning money cannot tend to the farm with the care necessary to meet the high quality standards of specialty coffee markets. When capital that should be reinvested in the farm is instead needed to pay interest on a never-ending cycle of debt, productivity declines. Farmers who clear-cut their forests remove the shade that is the foundation of any concept of environmentally friendly coffee. And when desperation finally forces a farmer to sell off land, the availability of coffee is jeopardized. Without investment to address these issues, the gains farmers make through their participation in sustainable coffee markets can be, quite literally, swept away overnight.

Sustainable for whom?
A chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and a sustainable coffee trade must work for all stakeholders in the chain. But today, the entire “sustainable coffee” enterprise is at risk because many smallholder farmers simply do not have livelihoods that are sustainable by any standard. Indicators for “sustainability” in the specialty coffee market are certifications whose standards are set and enforced at the market end of the coffee chain by organizations in the U.S.
and Europe. Meanwhile, at the production end, we see a gap between the reality and the rhetoric of sustainable coffees.
Even some smallholder farmers selling double and triple-certified coffees struggle mightily. The sustainable coffee conversation needs to refocus on coffee origins to address the acute needs of smallholder farmers.

Sustainability 2.0
It is time to expand the concept of sustainability and build on the foundation laid by two generations of sustainability pioneers all along the coffee chain. “Sustainability 2.0” will require new perspectives and non-traditional collaboration among diverse stakeholders.

Development agencies and the donors that fund them will need to couple traditional “development” issues with new disciplines in the field. Too often in the development community we have divorced our work on core issues like food security from narrower, newer pursuits, including the highly specialized technical assistance farmer organizations need to meet the stringent demands of dynamic coffee markets.

For coffee industry actors, this may mean building non-traditional competencies and new investments into their business models to secure supplies of high-quality coffee in competitive markets. Donors and development agencies will need to support the industry in this process and provide expertise in livelihoods issues. We will all need a better understanding of one another’s opportunities and constraints.

The first step, however, is broadening the conversation on sustainable coffees. Leading academics have begun to incorporate livelihoods issues into their analysis of sustainable coffees, but few in the mainstream of the coffee industry, development field or donor community have followed suit. Comprehensive analysis of smallholder farmer livelihoods will reveal potential sources of unsustainability in coffee chains and identify opportunities for new investments beyond them. Sharing examples of successful community-driven interventions that are costeffective
and replicable can help show the way forward.

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Mark Earth Day by taking the St. Francis Pledge

Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009

We thank Dan Misleh of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) for this Earth Day call to action:

As the United States marks Earth Day, USCCB and CRS are among the national Catholic organizations calling on Catholic individuals and families, parishes and schools, religious communities, colleges and hospitals and other Catholic organizations to take a unique St. Francis Pledge to Care for Creation and the Poor.

The efforts of the Catholic Coalition on Climate Change respond to and build upon the leadership of Pope Benedict XVI, the U.S. Catholic Bishops, and many Catholic religious communities who believe that our response to climate change must be guided by the exercise of prudence, the pursuit of the common good and a priority for the poor. A list of coalition members is below.

YOU are asked to take the St Francis Pledge to Care for Creation and the Poor by promising to:
• PRAY and reflect on the duty to care for God’s creation and the poor and vulnerable;
• LEARN about and educate others on both the reality of climate change and its moral dimensions;
• ASSESS your participation in contributing to climate change (i.e. consumption and conservation);
• ACT to change your choices and behaviors contributing to climate change and;
• ADVOCATE Catholic principles and priorities in climate change discussions and decisions, especially as they impact the poor and vulnerable.

The coalition’s website offers concrete help in carrying out the St Francis Pledge with specific ways for Catholics to learn to “tread lightly and act boldly”, reducing your own carbon footprint as an expression of solidarity with those most impacted by climate change.

“The real ‘inconvenient truth’,” according to John Carr of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, “is that those who contribute the least to climate change in our own country and around the world will suffer the most and have least capacity to respond. Poor families and vulnerable workers and farmers are most likely to bear the greatest burdens in responding to climate change. We believe an essential moral measure of the debate and decisions on climate change will be how it helps or hurts the poor and vulnerable in the U.S. and abroad.”

In addition to CRS and USCCB, organizational partners and sponsors of the Covenant Campaign include:

  • Catholic Charities USA serving nearly 8 million people in more than 1700 local Catholic Charities agencies and institutions.
  • The Catholic Health Association of the United States serving one in six Americans in hospitals
  • The National Catholic Education Association, the largest private education system in the world
  • The Conference of Major Superiors of Men and the Leadership Conference of Women Religious representing hundreds of religious communities who lead with a sense of mission and real world examples of how to care for people in poverty and for God’s gift of creation.
  • The Franciscan Action Network,
  • the National Council of Catholic Women
  • the National Catholic Rural Life Conference
  • the National Federation of Priests’ Councils,
  • the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities, and many others.

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Specialty Coffee’s Return to Its Roots

Tuesday, May 6th, 2008

During the opening ceremony of the 2008 SCAA in Minneapolis, MN, Bill Fishbein, owner of CRS coffee partner Coffee Exchange and founder of Coffee Kids, made a presentation on the 20th anniversary of Coffee Kids, an organization which helps coffee-growing families improve the quality of their lives. He made the simple but challenging statement that he loved coffee and wouldn’t want to make his living any other way, but not at any one else’s expense.

The theme of this year’s Specialty Coffee Association of America conference is Roots. And while the Specialty Coffee companies have always prided themselves on the quality of the coffee they serve, this year the conference focused on the fact that without strong roots nothing will thrive. If we aren’t paying attention to the communities in which the coffee itself is rooted in, it’s doesn’t matter how well you roast, package and market the coffee, the entire industry will suffer.

In many ways, the roots of the coffee industry, the coffee farmers themselves, are suffering- from increasing costs of production due to higher petroleum prices, to food insecurity caused by profits that don’t last the year long, and an unpredictable environment from climate change that threatens their coffee crops and the overall coffee supply.

However, the Specialty Coffee Industry recognizes its role as a progressive force and role model for the entire coffee industry. The buzz word for the conference was sustainability. If coffee isn’t a sustainable crop or a part of a sustainable livelihood for farmers, then it isn’t a sustainable industry in the United States. For those of you addicted to that morning cup of coffee, it’s a scary thought. Bill’s statement isn’t just a challenge to the coffee industry to rethink its relationship with farmers, it’s also a challenge for us to consider at who’s expense am I able to have my morning cup of coffee.

So how can we enjoy that morning cup of coffee and know that it didn’t get there at any one else’s expense? Well, if you’ve read this blog before, you know what I’m going to say. Buy your coffee from one of our ‘fully committed to Fair Trade’ partners. Ok, yes that’s true. But, another speaker during the opening ceremony, Michael Shuman, gave me a whole new appreciation for our partners and how they promote economic justice overseas and in their own communities. Shuman is the author of The Small-Mart Revolution and part of his presentation showed how these small companies are a benefit to their local communities. In fact, locally owned companies make up at least 58% of the U. S. economy. They tend to pay their employees better than larger out-of-town firms. They also tend to funnel more money into the local economy by using local services, like lawyers, accountants, and in the case of coffee and cafes, let’s use the example of maybe purchasing milk from a local dairy. They are essential to the health of our communities.

 

Lunch at SCAA

CRS Fair Trade partners and allies gather for lunch at SCAA.

 

Within the CRS Fair Trade program, we have 17 coffee partners rooted in their own localities, making decisions that benefit their community in the United States. They also choose to sell only Fair Trade products which have a positive impact in coffee growing communities in many ways, one of which being that coffee cooperatives are democratically run and are able to make decisions in the best interest of their members. It’s like a double shot of subsidiarity! When folks are able to make decisions that have the most benefit for their communities we’re getting much closer to a cup of coffee in your hands that didn’t arrive at anyone’s expense.

The highlight at SCAA was not a presentation, but it was sitting down with all of our partners and allies that were able to attend SCAA at a great, local restaurant for lunch. Jefferson Shriver, our Head of Programs for CRS Nicaragua was in town for the events, as well as a couple special guests- Jitzie, a coffee grower from the La FEM coop in Nicaragua and Esperanza the head of the Pangoa cooperative in Peru. Everyone had great stories about how and why they choose to become involved in Fair Trade, but these aren’t the individuals that are going to transform the coffee industry and strengthen its roots. They’re members of the communities that have already started to.

 

Chris Treter and James Curren

Chris Treter of Higher Grounds Trading Co. and James Curren of Providence Coffee discuss how they became involved in Fair Trade during lunch at SCAA.

 

Two more things:

CRS Fair Trade was happy to help Just Coffee bring Jitzie to SCAA, and La FEM was featured in the most recent CRS Briefing. For more information on La FEM and CRS’ work in Nicaragua, click “I love coffee from La FEM”.

A couple books I left SCAA with that you might be interested in-

Michael Shuman, The Small-Mart Revolution

Christopher Bacon, Stephen Gliessman, and V. Ernesto Mendez, Confronting the Coffee Crisis: Fair Trade, Sustainable Livelihoods, and Ecosystems in Mexico and Latin America

I haven’t read them yet, but if you have, feel free to share your book review.

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