Organic fair Trade
While selling Homeland Organic Coffee at the Owings Mills Farmers’ Market this summer and fall it was a pleasure chatting with coffee lovers and hearing their questions. (This Sunday, October 24th is the last day for this season.) Two particular questions came up over and over again.
“What is ‘organic coffee’?” and “What is Fair Trade?” There are, of course, simple and complicated answers to these questions. The third question is “What is “FTO.” (FTO is Fair Trade Organic.)
My typical short answer to the first question is: “Coffee grown without synthetic pesticides, synthetic herbicides, irradiation or synthetic fertilizers is organic coffee.” Essentially, the generally accepted modern day term “Organic” is understood to apply to farming as it was practiced before the 20th Century.
All of the coffee Homeland Organic sells is grown on small family farms, slightly larger farms owned cooperatively by several families or small Estate farms that employ Organic/Sustainable farming methods on principle. We always ask for the FTO certificate from the grower. This is our effort to guarantee the everything we sell is FTO
“Bird friendly” coffee is another term occasionally asked about. It is grown using sustainable farming methods (which adds criteria to the definition of “organic farming”), and although there is no official definition of “bird friendly”, the general consensus seems to be that this method of farming leaves the taller trees in place to create a habitat for migrating flocks of birds. So, you will ask, how “bird friendly” different from “shade grown”? Stay tuned for the answer to that question. “What is organic?” turns out to be an environmental and a food effects question. The reason I sell organic coffee is because there have been too many cases of cancers in my family in the last three generations, including my own generation.
“What is Fair Trade?” turns out to be more of a market place and social justice question. There are two ways to buy coffee and there are two ways it is produced. Two large food corporations (both American) own and control the vast majority of global coffee production and distribution. They shall go unnamed.
To make a long story short these two corporations own the production farms and processing facilities and hire local labor mostly in third world countries. The economics of these two global operations tend to put downward pressure on their workers’ wages. The average coffee worker makes somewhere near $1.25 per hour.
The concept of “Fair Trade” in simple terms is to pay the grower a higher price (higher than the corporate rate) for their coffee and pay them directly. The effort to bypass the corporate structure makes the grower to consumer product movement more efficient. A coffee importer in the fair trade supply line would generally travel to the production farm or coop to buy the coffee, and send it directly to his distribution facility in this country. And from there it would typically move directly to coffee roasters. In my particular chain of product movement the roasted coffee would then move to my Farmers’ Market customers. What all of this does is allows the importer to pay a higher per pound price which in turn allows the coop to do things like build community schools and hospitals. Hence, the added value to this kind of coffee market allows growers to keep more of the profit to improve their standard of living while also helping to maintain a healthier global environment.
For us here at Homeland Organic, selling fair trade coffee is a matter of social justice. Selling organic coffee is an effort to support sustainable farming and, as we believe, that consuming synthetic-chemical-free products helps reduce whatever ill affects those chemicals may cause on the environment and our personal health. We are not doctors and we are not providing any medical advice, we leave this entirely up to you and your doctor.
Homeland Organic is growing and changing. The opportunity to make our hot and cold coffee and hot sauces available at the Fell’s Point Farmers’ Market this year has revealed the popularity of our Pink House Coffee brand. It has grown by leaps and bounds. Rarely do we have any coffee left over after our Saturday Fell’s Point Farmers’ Market.
