Why Fair Trade (Still)?

Our roaster was one of the first Fair Trade certified coffee roasters in New Mexico, starting around the turn of the century. In those days, before the Third Wave of coffee, the third-party-audited labeling scheme was a fairly new idea, especially in America. Red Rock brought Fair Trade coffee to grocery shelves in New Mexico because we wanted to allow consumers to understand and verify the origin of their daily brew. There was no other effort being made at the time for transparency in the coffee supply chain, and Fair Trade certification provided standards to ensure guaranteed minimum prices paid to producers and prohibited child and slave labor and worker abuse. Fairtrade International and our certifier, Fair Trade USA, still administer these rigorous standards.

By the 2010s, Specialty coffee was experiencing what is now called the Third Wave, and a large part of the Third Wave ethos was the marketing of personal relationships with coffee producers. This was when the term “Direct Trade” first appeared, to describe a business relationship in which the roaster is also directly responsible for sourcing (rather than buying from an importer’s stock). The inventors of the concept wanted to achieve the cache of Fair trade when buying from producers for whom Fair Trade certification doesn’t make any sense, namely for estate coffees.

Over the years, we have critiqued the use of the term “Direct Trade” as co-opted and dilute, and that’s why we’ve never used it, even when it describes how we are sourcing coffee. This decision was really a reaction to how the Direct Trade movement had, embedded within it, a critique of Fair Trade that I never found…fair.

The criticism was essentially, “Look, smallholder cafeteros are still impoverished despite Fair Trade. It doesn't work for everyone, and when it does work, the gains are modest. Therefore, instead of a third-party-audited system in which the rules and prices are available for anyone to see, we’re going to instead have a system of Trust Me, Bro, I Went There Once.”

(I'm snarking. Many firm-led initiatives do publish their rules. Rules that they made up. That they check to make sure they're complying with.)

And I think because I had seen the positive impact of Fair Trade with my own eyes, and also because as a principle, you should not trust businesses to prioritize anyone’s interests but their own, I took exception to the 2010s coffee industry criticisms of Fair Trade.

It’s true that many coffee farmers in the world, especially smallholders, still live in poverty. However, Fair Trade does improve income—by a lot, when the C market price is low. It “increases living standards by 30% and reduces the prevalence and depth of poverty.” Fair Trade increases the purchasing power of the poorest farmers. For more reading, here’s a balanced paper noting that the benefits of Fair Trade and Organic certification are heterogeneous and greatest when the market price is low (as it has been for most of my career, but is very clearly not right now).

To qualify what a modest improvement in poverty might look like: in Peru, Isabel Uriarte of PROASSA told me that the villages in Lambayeque that we were visiting used to experience severe malnutrition before certification—like the kids had swollen bellies, that kind of severity. While the villages still experience a kind of poverty we don’t really see in this country, by the time of our visit they had clean water, supplemental nutrition, paved roads, schoolrooms, and health clinics, which these communities attributed to their Fair Trade, Organic, and Cafe Femenino premiums, as commemorated on these roadside plaques:

Experiences like these, with coffee producers, are what has influenced my opinions on this topic more than anything, even while I would defend my position as essentially evidence-based. That said, it is also experience with coffee producers that tells me that Fair Trade is not the only way to buy coffee ethically, and that producers have diverse needs depending on their property, location, expertise, socioeconomic position, and many other factors. It is obviously true that there are many coffee producers who would gain no benefit at all from any certification, possibly because they own an estate, possibly because their quality is so high they can ask a very good price. 

So, even as we treasure our direct purchasing relationships now more than ever, we opt out of using the term Direct Trade, which is inherently (linguistically) presented as an alternative to third-party certifications, but in reality is a different thing—benefiting a different kind of producer—altogether. And we still purchase and promote Fair Trade coffees. About half our offerings are FTO, we've been buying those coffees from those producers for twenty+ years, and we have no plans to stop anytime soon. As a consumer, I buy Fair Trade bananas and chocolate, because otherwise I just have no way to know that any social standards were adhered to at all. 

But as of this writing, in late 2025, I actually don’t see a lot of coffee marketing containing either phrase anymore. Most roasters seem not to have to account for their sourcing in any specific away at all. The customer just doesn’t apparently require this anymore. I see this as part of an overall checking-out or burning-out that’s happened in the past few years, as well as being the nadir of a typical coffee industry trend cycle. 

So, if you’ve read this far because you care whether the people who pick and process your coffee are okay, you must be pretty special, and that makes sense because our customers are the best.  If you buy a bag of Fair Trade coffee from us for the rest of October, you’ll be automatically entered in a raffle to win one of three FTO Coffee samplers (each containing three 12-ounce bags). We’ll pull names on November 3^rd and announce the winners via email.

We're not that big a company, so your odds are really good. You should enter. 

Pak Bukri, 45, picks coffee cherries at his farm in Aceh, Sumatra, Indonesia. He has been a member of the Permato Gayo cooperative since 2009. "I enjoy working as a coffee farmer because I can be my own boss," he says. Photo credit: Andri Tambunan for Fair Trade.