World Fair Trade Day Celebrates Fair Trade Coffee and More
They say helping others makes you happy. Well, with your daily cup of fair trade coffee you can help farmers and workers in traditionally exploited regions earn fair wages for their labor, while enjoying your brew!
Now, there are a few problems with the above declaration.
First: but coffee might kill you! It might. But so might everything else you do on earth, and the benefits of coffee outweigh the risks for the majority of people. Emphasis on the emphasis. We cover the pros and cons of coffee consumption in depth here.
It’s worth noting that you may well want to examine your relationship with coffee. Robb Wolf says it best here: “There are those that truly enjoy coffee—its smell, its taste, and the entire experience. These are the people at the Starbucks counter that ‘take it black’. And then, there’s the other side. These folks only drink coffee with cream, coconut milk, sugar, coffee mate, raw milk, honey, coconut creamer, artificial sweeteners, whipped cream, squirts of flavored syrups … NEWS FLASH: YOU DO NOT REALLY LIKE COFFEE!! You like cream, sugar, honey, whipped cream, etc.” Let’s not use coffee to justify additive consumption, no?
Say you really enjoy coffee and are looking for the best brews. The second view would be that “fair trade” is an over-used moniker justifying high prices for which middlemen companies profit, not suppliers and producers in Costa Rica or Guatemala or wherever. It might. But even if you don’t have the time or inclination to research a company peddling your coffee beans in an in-depth way, the chances are good that a company going to the effort to label themselves fair trade is paying higher wages—even if they aren’t what you might consider fair—than the average joe (har har).
For more on fair trade, check out our Who What Why Fair Trade article here.
This Saturday is World Fair Trade Day, so why not give a new fair trade bean variety the taste test? It can’t hurt, and you might just discover a new favorite brew.
Image: Some rights reserved by nagillum