Is price a deciding factor when shopping for your favorite coffee, chocolate, or bananas? For imported goods from around the world, price alone often conceals the full story. Low grocery store prices often indicate that someone or something has absorbed a hidden cost along the supply chain. In conventional agricultural systems, those costs are frequently transferred to farmworkers through low wages and poor working conditions, or absorbed by the environment through unsustainable farming practices.
For products that are grown abroad by necessity due to the ideal tropical environments for coffee, tea, bananas, and cocoa, the Fair Trade certification offers a different approach. Rather than prioritizing the lowest possible price, Fair Trade helps build supply chains based on equitability rather than exploitation. During Fair Trade month, it’s worth taking a closer look at some of the products we use every day from around the world and the shared challenges facing the communities producing them.
Tea is the world’s most popular drink after water. Nearly 70% of all tea is grown in China, India, Sri Lanka, and Kenya. The bulk of tea is grown on large plantations where workers often live and work long hours with little pay. Volatile global tea prices can make it difficult for both plantation workers and smallholder farmers to earn a stable income. Back in October of 2015, Bon Appétit was the first food service company to make a commitment to source Fair Trade tea in our cafés nationwide.
Bananas are grown on large plantations in Latin America, and on farms in Africa and in Asia as well. Nearly all exported bananas are a single variety, making plantations especially vulnerable to pests and disease. Reliance on monoculture often leads to heavy pesticide use, which harms the soil, water, biodiversity, and particularly the health of farmworkers who face long hours in these conditions.
Cocoa, the key ingredient in chocolate, is produced primarily in West Africa — Côte d’Ivoire is the largest producer of cocoa by a significant margin. Despite supplying one of the world’s most profitable industries, many cocoa farmers live in poverty. Low incomes have contributed to widespread child labor, with an estimated one and a half million children working in cocoa production in Côte d’Ivoire.
Coffee’s supply chains are complicated. Coffee beans grow best in equatorial regions, however once the beans are grown, they are sold through a long series of traders, processors, exporters, roasters and retailers. This extensive process leaves farmers with little control over where their beans end up, and how much they can charge for them. Because coffee beans are typically shipped abroad for further processing, growers are unable to profit directly from this highly valuable global commodity.
Although these products come from all over the world, they share similar challenges: volatile markets, unequal bargaining leverage, labor exploitation, and climate change. Fair Trade helps address these issues by creating more equitable trading systems by setting rigorous standards for industry stakeholders to follow.
Becoming Fair Trade certified is a complex and rigorous third-party certification process that takes many months to ensure minimum requirements for labor standards are being met, followed by an annual audit process to maintain the Fair Trade label. In order to protect workers from volatile price fluctuations of commodities on the global market, companies adopt a Fair Trade Minimum Price to create a safety net for workers to have sustained livelihoods. Each Fair Trade product also has a premium that goes into a Community Development Fund, which is used towards community investment projects agreed upon by workers in the Fair Trade Committee.
We are proud to source Fair Trade tea companywide, and to continue working towards better conditions and compensation for producers abroad during Fair Trade Month and beyond.
