Ethical buying and ethical selling
As well as ethical buying from growers to make sure they get rewarded for the quality product, sequestration of carbon and avoidance of chemicals in the environment, there is also a thing like ethical selling. We need to keep organic products affordable so more people can buy them.
The poverty cycle
A lot of small growers live of their land. They grow their own food and get their drinking water, fuel and construction materials from the land. Coffee is grown as cash crop. These people often produce very good, chemical-free coffee as they look after their little farm. It is all they possess, it is all they can pass on. However that quality is not valued by the traders who often work for very large businesses, buying 1000s of Tons of coffee. Traders love small unorganised growers as the trader can set the price. The prices they offer will be the lowest they can get away with, and if they drive the farmer off in despair they are often happy to take over the farm for bargain price as eg settlement for cash advancements they provided. Traders quite like them hooked on chemicals knowing they will be back for increasingly more chemicals and needing more advancements on the next crop to pay for them. They are stuck. The moment they stop being organic there is even less reason to not give them the lowest market price possible. Of course this is a crude and cruel description but in essence that is unfortunately what often happens, also on much bigger non-coffee farms.
Cooperatives as solution
The solution to the dependency on traders, is form small growers to work together in community groups or cooperatives. With some assistance to buy processing equipment they can process coffee to a level and quantity where they have more choice of buyers, especially if they can afford a truck. The coop can organise and hire training. Once even bigger they can reach out to foreign buyers, which is of course much easier with internet. However it is not easy to set up good functioning cooperatives with good governance structures and without big overheads for their size. Many coops get into financial trouble especially when members are not obliged to offer their harvest to the cooperative which is for example the case in Peru. In low harvest years the coops do not get enough coffee and their overheads get them into trouble. So in some cases coops work, in most other cases more losely organised, low overhead cooperations work better.
Integrity
In many countries with poor farmers and where many communities carry scars from internal conflict, it is hard to find trust and enough motivation to set up coops despite its advantages IF DONE CORRECTLY. It is almost an impossible job. This is where we as buyers can help. We need to communicate, try to meet both parties' needs and commit some volume and a longer term perspective, so there is incentive to invest. There is no easy way and building up trust takes time. Setting up elaborate, inefficient small coops so they can qualify for Fairtrade premiums, is often not the way that benefits the small growers but a leaner cooperative model has to be found that clearly works for the farmer.
True cost accounting
You never hear small farmers talk about return on investment. For them their farm is everything. It is their live. For large corporations or large farming operations the land is mostly just another investment and in order to maximise return on investment only one crop is grown and the growable area is maximised, and huts and trees are removed. Profits are to be maximised to have the investment paid back as soon as possible and big profits early pay back the fastest. Lands are cleared and flattened. With a very low cost of capital for large businesses, machines are cheap to replace workers but bad for soil. Then add some chemicals in the mix to bump up those profits whilst the soils are still good and one started the vicious circle of soil and environmental degradation requiring more chemicals each year for continuously less nutritious and less flavoursome crops and eventually falling yields. Who is paying for global warming, the cleaning up of waterways, collapse of biodiversity, health issues from chemical use and monocrops causing allergies? There is a real cost to all this and all these small organic farmers and almost-organic farmers, should get a better price for their efforts to not cause this damage and for producing a better product.
Ethical buying
The benefits of organic agriculture are consistently understated leaving consumers think there is little difference and not prepared to pay what should be only a relatively small premium. There is a huge difference.
Supply and demand of organic products is closely matched. With more demand, supply and price will become better. This is what the sector needs, education about organics and the impact of food forests and people prepared to pay a bit more for organics.
Ethical selling
Unfortunately organic certified products often cost a lot more to the consumer than what the difference in farmgate price is. Someone is trying to make money from your good conscious to buy ethical products. By doing so the products can become quite unaffordable to many and not offer the quality expected. The difference in price is a big dampener on demand which slows the growth of organic agriculture. We are passionate about making organics affordable and making it grow so we only pass on farmgate differentials.
Ask for certified products! In NZ organic is still a non-protected word and it can mean just about anything without certification.