Today's Fair Trade Coffee

Coffee is the second most traded commodity in the world, with trading volume second only to crude oil. It is traded in four major markets around the world, including the New York Futures Exchange, the Osaka Kansai Exchange, the Singapore Mercantile Exchange and the Euronext London. But I don't know much about Fairtrade coffee. Behind every cup of coffee in our hands is the story of the blood and sweat of coffee growers. Coffee imports in the United States cost about $0.6 to $0.7 per pound, and such low prices have turned tens of thousands of coffee plantations into veritable "sweatshops in the fields." What is even more unfair is that even with the $0.70, coffee growers cannot put it all in their own pockets, and their poor income is barely enough to make ends meet, or even to support the most basic livelihood of the family.

Thailand, for example, is one of the top 20 coffee producers in the world. At the critical point in the mountains of southern China, there are Akha people living in Thailand. The aka people used to make a living by growing opium, and although the opium trade amounts to millions of dollars a year, the aka people can barely make ends meet.

And it is not always a good thing for any country to rely on a large-scale opium trade. Therefore, in the early 1990s, the Thai royal family began to introduce new crops to replace opium, and coffee was one of them. Aka people have also begun to grow coffee. Akama coffee, which is popular on the market, is 100% Arabica coffee beans, with the right bitterness and acidity, and is very popular in North America.

However, the profits of the Akkas are still small. Technically, coffee is regarded as a fresh agricultural product, but from an economic point of view, coffee is also regarded as a commodity, which means that it is bought and sold in the same way as oil, and the buyer's goal is to buy it as low as possible and then sell it at a high price, while coffee investors and speculators price according to the supply and demand of the coffee market. In this way, a regular cup of coffee at Starbucks may cost us $2, while a kilogram of coffee raw beans is only 7 cents, which shows what a lucrative industry coffee is. When you read this, you must think that this is too unfair to the Akkans who grow coffee. But what can be done?

First of all, the Akkans have no choice at all. Every year, as soon as the coffee harvest season comes, coffee buyers appear and they ask for a uniform purchase price. If the aka people are not satisfied with the purchase price and dare to say "no" to the buyer, the risk taken by the aka people is tantamount to giving up the opportunity to sell coffee crops and stubbornly waiting for the risk that the harvest will rot in the soil very quickly. Second, most Akkans have no formal education and lack bargaining skills. Many Akkans do not even speak Thai (aka, one of the Tibetan-Burmese languages), and they are not aware of the global price of coffee and how to get information about the price of growing crops. All they can know is either to sell their crops for money or to lose everything. For this reason, "Fair Trade Coffee" came into being. The New York Times published the Fairtrade Coffee story in the fashion section in late April 2007. The purpose of labeling "Fair Trade Coffee" is to let coffee consumers know that the product respects the rights of working workers and means that farmers from the third World who grow coffee are no longer exploited and are reasonably paid; it is aimed at promoting healthy working conditions and stimulating farmers' greater willingness to engage in coffee production.

Today, companies such as McDonald's, Wal-Mart and Starbucks are willing to skip middlemen at twice the price and buy coffee directly from coffee growers. Among them, Starbucks is the largest buyer of Fairtrade certified coffee, buying 18 million kilograms of green, unroasted coffee in 2009. Therefore, I hope that those who like to drink coffee will buy coffee marked with the "Fair Trade" sign in the future. Because every time you buy a cup of Fairtrade coffee, you directly support poor farmers in developing countries and help them improve their living standards.