Local retailers support fair trade

“It’s about paying a fair price, but it’s also about knowing that kids aren’t being used as slave labor, women are being paid equally, and knowing that there’s a respect between myself and anyone in the chain and the person at the shop end,” co-owner David Crump said. “That’s fundamentally what this is all about – helping people help themselves.”

Fair trade, an exchange system that protects the interests of producers, in part by helping to ensure they’re fairly compensated for their goods, is big business worldwide. Fair-trade products are largely agricultural but also can include handmade goods such as textiles and pottery.

Fair-trade product sales totaled $2.6 billion in 2006, according to the Fair Trade Federation. And the trend is growing – the federation says global fair-trade cocoa sales grew 93 percent that year, while sales of coffee, tea and bananas grew by 53 percent, 41 percent and 31 percent, respectively.

Global Fayre, 324 S. Campbell Ave., sells food products, art and gift items from around the world. The shop is among local companies engaging in fair-trade practices as the marketplace becomes smaller due to changing technology and ideology.

The process

There are two basic methods for business owners to sell fair-trade products. One is the direct-trade method used by businesses such as Askinosie Chocolate, 514 E. Commercial St. Owner Shawn Askinosie works directly with cocoa bean growers to satisfy a self-imposed list of criteria.

Askinosie chooses to pay farmers above the fair-trade price, which is set on the international commodities market. He also opens his financial books to the farmers and shares profits.

The farmers, however, aren’t the only ones to benefit from the direct-trade process.

“It allows me to influence the taste of the final product, because I can have input as to how the product is handled post-harvest, which can make all the difference in the world in the taste,” Askinosie said. “The second thing is traceability – I have the name of every farmer who participated in growing our product – and the third is profit sharing. You can’t share profits with people you don’t know, because you don’t know where it’s going or who it’s going to.”

Askinosie has made two trips to disburse profits to the growers; he gives the group of farmers 10 percent of his company’s net profit, though he doesn’t disclose the dollar amount.

For Global Fayre’s David Crump, the direct method is too time-consuming – especially since his shop carries a multitude of products. Crump uses third-party distributors to supply him with products – but that doesn’t mean he isn’t concerned about the producers. He relies on groups such as Transfair USA to certify his suppliers.

“What’s important about fair trade for me is that there’s a degree of certification (and) authenticity that says when you buy a pack of coffee from us, you know what’s behind it,” Crump said.

The products

How sellers find producers depends largely on whether they use the direct or indirect approach.

Crump, who gets most of his products from Africa and India, said there are four basic ways he finds producers.

“We get a lot of leads from customers bringing in something they’ve bought in another country. That’s usually pretty complex, because you just have a label to go on,” he said. “There are source companies finding us through our Web site and blog. There are the different discussion groups, with people sharing new things they’ve come across. And the fourth is just us looking around, reading on what’s new and keeping up.”

Keeping up, however, is more difficult than ever; Crump notes that when fair-trade coffee wholesaler Equal Exchange opened more than 20 years ago, it was one of the first in the United States, but now there are more than 400 like companies.

The process is more difficult for a direct buyer like Askinosie, who does his own legwork.

“It’s not as simple as going to the Yellow Pages or Google, because these people are in very remote places, with cultures that have no comparison to ours whatsoever,” he said, noting that he gets cocoa beans from suppliers in Mexico and Ecuador and made a recent trip to an undisclosed Asian country. “It’s something that requires a great deal of time and patience.”

Several local coffee purveyors, including Mudhouse, Coffee Ethic and Oaxacafé Coffee Co. also offer fair-trade goods.

Oaxacafé owner James Olson uses a broker to supply fair-trade coffee beans from the Oaxaca region of Mexico, mainly because he doesn’t go through enough beans to merit a direct purchase.

“We’d have to buy 40,000 pounds each (order), and we don’t have the need for that,” Olson said, noting that he sells both traditionally harvested and fair-trade coffees from his 621 N. Washington Ave. headquarters and through area retail sites.

The challenges

Selling fair-trade products creates its own unique set of problems for retailers, and the most fundamental of those issues is making sure the products being sold as “fair trade” actually live up to their billing.

“The blessing and the curse of the Internet is that it’s easy for someone to pop up in five minutes as a brand new venture that looks credible,” Crump said. “It takes a lot of diligence on our end to make sure that the story they tell us is really true.”

Olson added that fair-trade products can cost significantly more than their counterparts, making it cost prohibitive to sell them to certain customers.

“We’d love to sell them all that way, but from the standpoint of running a business and making enough money to survive, you have to know who the audience is and if they’ll pay that extra to have fair trade,” he said. “If I’m selling a bag of coffee to a gift shop in Branson, they generally don’t have a real big concern about fair trade – they want to know how much it costs and whether it’s good quality. In a café setting, the audience is more conscientious.”

Early on in his chocolate-making venture, Askinosie learned the hard way that there’s some risk to using the direct-trade method. He sent $25,000 to a group of Venezuelan farmers, but he received nothing in return for his investment.

“There’s no way to recover if you make a mistake. It’s not like America, where you can get a lawyer, file a suit and get some repayment. Most of the people I deal with don’t even have a bank account,” Askinosie said. “The best I can say is, it’s buying without a net.”

Even so, Askinosie doesn’t plan to change his methods.

“There are days I want to throw my hands up and say, ‘What am I doing?’” Askinosie said. “If I used some other method, I could call a commodity broker and have product in a month or two. But it’s not a question of whether there’s another way to do it, because it’s part of who we are as a company.”

What is Fair Trade?

The Fair Trade Federation defines fair trade as a “system of exchange that seeks to create greater equity and partnership in international trading” through a variety of factors, including paying fair local wages to producers, ensuring environmental sustainability, providing financial and technical support, and offering a transparent process.