A few conscientious customers have inquired lately about the absence of the “fair trade mark” on our coffee bags. As a company deeply concerned both with responsible trading practices and with transparency, we want to make sure we provided a complete answer. Doing so will require taking a quick step back to look at Fair Trade as a whole.

Fair Trade is an alternative economic model pioneered during the 1960s and 70s (see here and here), which focuses on building relationships between producers and consumers and ensuring that these relationships are grounded in a few defining principles: realistic and sustainable prices; cooperative, democratically-run work environments; financial and technical support for producers; respect for cultural integrity; public accountability; etc.

Inevitably, these goals focus mainly on the production end of the supply chain, on the “farm gate” transactions between producers and representatives of the global market. In Fair Trade’s original formulation, that supply chain was short enough that consumers in the developed world had direct access to information about the goods they were buying, in part because most companies involved in the movement saw Fair Trade as their entire business model. However, as Fair Trade gathered steam and began to spread into the marketplace as a whole, the need became apparent for some sort of third-party verification that the Fair Trade system had actually been respected. Hence, the development of Fair Trade certifying agencies.

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