Trade Aid - Making a World of Difference
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Buy your coffee or tea on-line:

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The World Coffee Crisis - and the Importance of Fair trade

The global coffee industry is in crisis. Although world consumption is growing, and the value of the coffee trade makes it the world’s second most valuable commodity after oil, many of the world’s 25 million coffee growers face immense hardship. How can this be?

Trade, unfortunately, simply isn't fair. The coffee producing countries have some of the lowest levels of income and some of the lowest GDPs in the world. Many coffee growers are receiving only a fraction of the value of their coffee.

The most difficult concept for Western consumers to grasp is that growers have no real say in the price they wil be paid, nor an easy alternative to growing coffee as a cash crop. In effect, they are paid just enough to prevent them from pulling out their crops and growing something else, but not enough to earn a living wage.

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The coffee was planted in the first place at the order of European powers looking to make profit on their colonial investment and while today the colonial powers have long since pulled out, their legacy, vast coffee plantations that cannot easily be replaced with other crops remain.  

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What is Fair Trade, and how does it benefit coffee growers?

Many people now accept that more must be done to help improve the living conditions of coffee growers. The most effective, guaranteed way to help growers is to buy Certified Fairtrade coffee. Coffee that carries the FLO international logo ensures that the growers have received a better deal, including:

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For more information about FLO go to www.fta.org.nz
  • A guaranteed minimum price which provides them and their families with enough money to meet their basic needs - including adequate living conditions, and basic education and health requirements
  • An expectation of regular future orders they can rely on to help maintain this basic standard of living
  • Partial prepayments, when necessary, to help cover their costs of production

Why should I source my coffee beans from
Trade Aid?

Trade Aid has been New Zealand's foremost fair trader for over 30 years, and has an excellent reputation within the international fair trade community. Our focus is, and always has been, firmly on the welfare of our suppliers. If we think the certified Fairtrade model is the best way to support coffee growers it is on the basis of extensive industry research and experience.

 

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But are Fairtrade beans quality?

  • Green beans supplied by Trade Aid recently featured in the gold-medal winning best organic coffee at the BP New Zealand Coffee Festival and Awards
  • In the 2004 Cup of Excellence awards in Nicaragua, growers from the PRODECOOP co-op, who supply Trade Aid, finished first, second, and third.
  • Trade Aid has a proven record at ensuring consistent supply of green beans. We have excellent supply contacts and work hard to ensure we always have enough beans on hand to supply anyone who wants to buy them
  • As well as being certified Fairtrade, all Trade Aid’s beans are certified organic and most are shadegrown as well, providing maximum environmental as well as social benefit in the coffee growing lands

What proof can Trade Aid offer that coffee growers who sell certified Fairtrade coffee receive extra benefit themselves?

“With Fairtrade income we have made improvements to our community. Before we slept on the ground and did not have basic amenities. Now some of us have floors, some furniture and potable water. If we sold all of our production at Fair Trade prices our dreams would come true”

“Thanks to Fairtrade, one of my children is now in medical school and the other is in midwifery school”

“Fairtrade income is used to buy medicine for the Cooperative Café Timor’s primary healthcare clinics. For that I am grateful, as the clinic’s staff saved my wife’s life during the recent birth of our child”

“With the revenue I receive from Fairtrade, I am able to provide for my children and improve my home. Now I do not owe any money to the intermediaries or the money lenders; I have begun to grow a wide variety of crops” 

Where can I buy Fair Trade coffee?

Locations of where Fair trade products are available

If you are a retailer you can use Trade Aid's business to business site or if you are an individual you can order Trade Aid coffee on-line, go to New Internationalist's site
   
 
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© Trade Aid 2009