The first time we paid attention to the words was in England, around 2009. Every paper cup said fair trade. Then the chocolate did too. Fair trade, fair trade, everywhere — enough of it to eventually wonder what it actually meant.
It turns out to be a harder question than it looks, starting with the fact that there is no single definition.
Fair trade
Fair trade is a certification, and the definition varies by country — which is why the UK, the leading importer of certified goods, seemed saturated with it while America barely mentioned it. In 2011 the US body split from the international one to write its own guidelines, and the main point of disagreement was coffee.
The guidelines run in both directions. Growers must provide decent working conditions and farm sustainably. Buyers must pay a floor price and cannot go below it. The weight of the benefit sits with the grower, which is the entire point and is a good thing.
Seems straightforward. It is not.
Direct trade
The other side of the coin. Direct trade means the roaster buys from the grower with nobody in between — pays well above the commodity price, visits the farm, and builds a relationship that runs across years rather than harvests.
The practical result is better coffee, because a roaster who is on the farm is selecting for quality rather than accepting a grade. It also means they have seen the working conditions with their own eyes rather than trusting a certificate. Intelligentsia and Counter Culture are the best-known American examples, and each will vouch personally for the farms they buy from.
The awkward part
Certification costs money.Auditing a farm and regulating its prices is expensive work, and much of the world’s coffee is grown by smallholders in developing countries who cannot carry the fee. Some do not qualify at all.
Which produces a genuinely strange outcome: a certification designed to protect the most vulnerable growers systematically excludes the smallest of them, and some of the finest coffee in the world sits outside the label entirely.
Meanwhile the scheme covers so many farms that meaningful oversight of every one of them is impossible. So you end up with regulated farms that nobody can really watch, and unregulated farms watched closely by a roaster who has met the family.
So which one
Unless you have time to research every bag, direct trade is the better bet. You get better coffee, and the accountability is a person rather than a process.
The drawback is that “direct trade” is not a certification. Nobody audits the phrase. It means exactly as much as the roaster printing it is willing to stand behind, which is a great deal from some and nothing at all from others.
The honest summary: a label tells you a process was followed; a relationship tells you somebody is accountable. Neither is a guarantee. Buy from roasters who will tell you the farm’s name.