April 30, 2008 News+Opinion » Features

The friction between the fair-trade and local-first movements 

Trading Places

by Eric Blair
Ray Keane, a trader with coffee importer Balzac brothers & company, checks out the merchandise
  • Leslie McKellar
  • Ray Keane, a trader with coffee importer Balzac brothers & company, checks out the merchandise

Latest in Features

Food shopping has never been more political than it is now. Beyond the clutter of brands vying for consumers' attention in any grocery store aisle, deep social movements are at play, and marketers are keen to exploit their ideas to slap an additional 30 cents on a price tag. Eat organic. Buy local. Help children in Africa get access to clean drinking water. Support Lowcountry shrimp. The consumer is more powerful than ever, and at times, also more confused.

A few years ago, the concept of buying fair trade goods caught on. To be considered fair trade, a product has to meet the labor and environmental standards set by one of several international organizations. While the fair trade sales are still rapidly increasing, the public's concern has shifted toward global warming and eating local.

Now, the green movement is all the rage. Lowcountry Local First, an organization that promotes local food and agriculture, was formed six months ago and has quickly expanded its activities. The idea behind the "eat local" movement is to strengthen ties between local consumers and producers, increase awareness about where and how food is produced, and reduce CO2 emissions by encouraging people to eat food that doesn't have to travel thousands of miles to get to your dinner table.

But can today's moral standard be reconciled with the one from a few years ago? Is it possible to eat local and support farmers in developing countries? And should that be the goal in the first place?

In the United Kingdom, where both the fair trade and eat local movements are more established, tensions between the two movements have reportedly increased in recent years, but so far, that is not the case in the United States and certainly not in Charleston, where recently the city's one fair trade store, Global Awakening on King Street, had a flier from Lowcounty Local First on its front counter.

However, on some college campuses, a debate about how to approach these issues has begun. William Moseley, a geography professor at Macalester College in Minnesota, whose research focuses on agriculture in southern and western Africa, has first-hand experience.

Recently, Moseley began to notice that while many of his students were becoming more interested in eating local, they didn't have the same enthusiasm for fair trade. This concerned him because while the market for fair trade represents less than one percent of global agricultural trade, it is growing around 40 percent a year.

Moseley believes fair trade presents a way for small organic farmers and food cooperatives to become economically viable in the face of competition from large-scale plantation farms. He's seen this while studying a cooperative wine vineyard in South Africa run by about 60 black farmers. The cooperative provides its members with better health care and working conditions than the large-scale owner-operated vineyards and relies on wine exports to break even.

In November, Moseley wrote an editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle criticizing the local food movement for being too insular. He did not reject the idea of eating local, but argued that conscientious consumers had to balance localism with an international perspective, one that included understanding our connections to the developing world. The response he received on some websites was openly hostile, and he began to think that it was because he was pushing people outside their comfort zone. Buying local is, after all, a simple theory — you go to the supermarket and look for local goods — and he was asking people to take a more nuanced approach. Not everyone appreciated it.

"I think part of that frustration was that I was complicating things, and they didn't want it to be complicated, they didn't want to have to think more deeply about it," he says. "It pushes you to understand that you're part of a global trading system and that trading system isn't necessarily an even playing field."

Gawain Kripke, the policy director at Oxfam America, a global anti-poverty organization, is concerned about where this debate might be headed. He sees the local food movement as being driven by a mix of concerns — a sense of supporting one's community, knowing about how food is produced and its environmental cost. He says that we should understand what criteria we are applying when making decisions about the food we buy. Some fair-trade products, for instance, actually have a lower carbon footprint than their equivalent in the United States, even when the transportation costs are factored in.

"It's important to parse out what the motivations are, and I think there is a worry that the local movement might turn into protectionism or a me-first-ism about our economic relationships, and that could be devastating for poor people in other countries who are really looking for a first step on the economic ladder and trading the things they produce, like agricultural goods, is one of the ways they can improve their livelihoods," he says.

Perhaps no one is more responsible for bringing more fair-trade products into the port of Charleston than Raymond Keane, a trader with Balzac Brothers & Company, a coffee import company that has been in business since the early 1900s. Balzac imports roughly 50 million pounds of coffee beans into the United States a year. Within the last four years, the amount of those beans that are certified as having been produced under fair conditions for workers and with methods that are environmentally sustainable has more than doubled.

Keane says that the coffee industry is in the midst of a generational shift, as younger, more environmentally conscious leaders take the reigns. Much of the change, he says, is fueled by consumer interest. He realizes that producing and transporting coffee gives off CO2 emissions, but he doesn't see a way around it in the short term.

"It's our business, and it is an impact, but coffee is such a huge part of the life of all these people," he says. "To curtail that, if we as Americans say, 'If you don't produce it here, we really don't need to use it', so you are going to tell the 40 million Latin Americans who work in coffee that we don't want their product ... what would happen then?"

For Alan Moore, program director of the local and sustainable agricultural program at Lowcountry Local First, the key word is balance. He says that consumers can support fair trade, eat local, and buy organic because all three ideas come from the same root.

"All of these things hit on very important issues on being connected again with the land and what we eat, and I feel like they are equally important," he says.

It may not be so easy. Oxfam's Kirpke thinks that there is an unavoidable intellectual tension between the fair-trade and eat-local movements, and how progressives navigate that tension will help determine how the public as a whole sees the issue. He believes that for the foreseeable future, consumers will be faced with complex choices every time they make a grocery run.

"This all goes back to very old and deep debates about the environment and about globalization, and they're all playing out in our grocery shelves right now," he says.

Comments (4) RSS

Showing 1-4 of 4

Add a comment

I had never really been aware of the friction between local vs. fair trade and also found this article very interesting. We live in a truly connected world and although 'global trade' has gone on for millenia, it is only through globalization per se that we have become more aware of our global ties with other communities.
I own a fair trade company here in Charleston and have been for 4 years after moving from England (located at the City Market and online. I believe in a balance of local and global, but above all we must strive for environmental and social justice whether it be in rural villages and farming communties here around Charleston or remote communities in Africa.
As well as sell fair trade products i also place much emphasis on consumer education; knowledge enables us to make informed desisions about the life we wish to leave and consumers can be powerful motivators to sway big business, as they can and do vote with their dollar.
Lets hope that local and global organisations, farmers, teachers, parents, businesses and individuals can work towards the greater goal of ensuring a better future for our children, Everywhere!
Sincerely,
Susie Dolphin
Muenda Fairtrade

Posted by muenda on August 8, 2008 at 9:33 PM | Report this comment

Thanks for a thoughtful article. You are correct to highlight that these are complex issues - I have two personal examples of that complexity.

I am an artisan coffee roaster. I recently (and rather reluctantly) agreed to a license from a certifying agency to use their marks. My reluctance was not based solely on finances (though I admit to being reluctant to pay in-country fees for something I view to be of marginal benefit), but rather based on the fact that I will no longer be allowed to describe any transactions other than those they certify as "just, fair, or fair trade", despite the fact that I have direct trade relationships that certainly qualify in spirit. I was notified today by the certifier that I am to be included in a "new, simpler licensing agreement" which essentially amounts to minimum fees (which are higher than what I would pay based on a volume basis) and lower reporting and audit requirements. This is pretty obviously turning into an egregious cash grab, and the representative with whom I spoke essentially admitted as much. I told them I preferred the old program (sliding fees based on volume sold) and was informed this was no longer an option. I'm seriously contemplating just saying no, and posting the certifications from my importer for the coffees I buy on my website where my customers can simply inspect them for themselves - this is equal (perhaps more) assurance than they will get by simply viewing the mark on the bag. They may have trademarked the phrase "Fair Trade Certified" by they certainly do not own the intellectual concept of fair trade. What we need is more transparency, not more bureaucracy, and certainly not more fees that do not directly benefit producers.

On the topic of food miles, it is true that in the case of two completely equivalent goods, less shipping would have a favorable impact in terms of lowering emitted carbon. How does one deal with the case where the goods are not equal? We have invested a lot of money in state-of-the-art, ultra-efficient roasting equipment. The carbon emitted by production in my roaster is 97% less than with a traditional system. Given that it is so much lower, it is actually possible for me to ship it anywhere in the country, even by air, and have a lower total carbon emission than if the same coffee were purchased locally but roasted in a conventional roaster. But on this point I agree completely with the observation that consumers would prefer to not ruin a beautiful theory (that they generate less greenhouse gases by buying locally) with ugly facts (that they are better off purchasing from a distant, but far more efficient producer).

I hope that we can educate consumers and increase transparency, which will improve our food supply as well as the planet.

jim at muddydogcoffee.com

Posted by muddydog on June 17, 2008 at 6:48 PM | Report this comment

Thanks for this interesting story. I agree with the comment from localyokel and the concerns offered by both Kripke and Moseley. Like them, I support the principles of the Buy Local movement as I understand them to be: concern for the environment, support for strong communities, desire for knowledge about one's food sources and those who grow it, and the desire to foster relationships between producers and consumers.

As a worker-owner of Equal Exchange, an organization 100% committed to the original principles of Fair Trade, I believe that the values underlying both movements are rooted in these same convictions. A few months ago, I wrote a post addressing this point:
http://eecampaign.wordpress.com/2008/02/07/part-i-why-local-and-equal-exchange-fair-trade-are-two-sides-of-the-same-coin/

Since writing that post, however, I have become increasingly concerned about this trend toward a "local first and foremost" philosophy which is starting to take root. I worry that the Buy Local movement is in danger of crossing a line which some in the Fair Trade movement felt was crossed when the underlying principles and radical, alternative vision of trade justice of the movement were reduced to the slogan, "look for the seal". By simplifying the message in this way, important opportunities were lost to inform, educate, and raise consumer awareness of much that goes on in farming communities, agriculture economies and in trade relationships.

Consumer education must always be at the heart of any environmental or food justice movement. As Moseley comments, the issues are nuanced. Activists in both these movements should continue to challenge ourselves and others NOT to take the easy path, not to dumb down our movements - or patronize consumers by over-simplifying our messages. While we don't want to barrage and confuse consumers with a multitude of complex issues, we need to be honest and respectful.

He and Kripke are right when they say that not all food grown locally is implicitly better than the same food grown overseas. Tallying up one's food miles, might work as an overall indicator but shouldn't be used as gospel truth. Likewise, if supporting healthy, vibrant, local communities is our goal, and it should be, it shouldn't matter whether those communities are in Minneapolis or in Boaco, Nicaragua.

Let's not set up competing movements, but keep on-course and join these movements together to create the kind of food system that works for all of us, consumers, farmers and environmentalists.

Thanks,

Phyllis Robinson
Education & Campaigns Manager
Equal Exchange




Posted by Phyllis Robinson on June 13, 2008 at 5:09 PM | Report this comment

Interesting article. I think the problem can be solved by taking a balanced approach and by being a conscious consumer who looks all the way down the path that the product took from raw materials to the purchase point. Local produce and meat that is non-organic, cooked in a restaurant, served in a styrofoam or plastic container, frozen before use, produced using underpaid, illegal, migrant labor, etc, doesn't really seem to be substantially "greener" than nonlocal, organic, Fair-Trade products, IMHO.

Of course my judgement is impaired by my daily addiction to freshly ground, home-brewed, delicious, Fairtrade, organic coffee...

Posted by localyokel on May 30, 2008 at 2:10 PM | Report this comment

Add a comment

Classified Listings
Most Viewed


Powered by Foundation   © Copyright 2010, Charleston City Paper   RSS