The Challenges of Marketing Fair Trade - Wynne, Sandy

elationship with a community that enables researchers and students to study related areas
in the field while making a concrete impact on communities they study.
FLO and its NI members need more direct feedback from farmers to better
understand how the issues related to certification impact the marketplace. In 2007, FLO
invited producer groups to become members and finally agreed to increase the Fair Trade
Premium for coffee farmers from five cents to ten cents, and the Organic Differential
from fifteen cents to twenty cents. The Fair Trade Premium, also called the social
premium, is an amount paid to the cooperatives above the Fair Trade Minimum Price for
reinvestments in the community. The Organic Differential rewards farmers for meeting
organic standards. These increases were long overdue and suggest that some members of
FLO lack an understanding of the actual financial realities farmers face.
TFUSA’s lack of capacity to bring more than one or two new certified products to
market, even though it now takes in more than $4.5 million in licensing fees according to
TFUSA’s 2006 Annual Report, is being challenged by NGOs like interrupcion*.
interrupcion* works to develop sustainable transparent supply chains by partnering with
the Institute for Market-ecology (IMO), a Fair Trade and Organic certifier, and
Asociación Civil Interrupcion*, a non-profit development organization. My conversations
with people from small local coffee companies, suppliers and health food markets in
Vermont reflect a prevailing frustration and disappointment in TFUSA. The overriding
sense is that small retailers are less important to TFUSA than the MNCs like Starbucks.
This shortsightedness of TFUSA to underestimate the importance of grass roots support
is a serious risk to the future of Fair Trade in the U.S. If TFUSA continues to be seen as a
“problem” rather than as a partner, retailers may be cautious about carrying Fair Trade
43