July Coffee News

-Fair Trade Part 1: shorting the supply chain, fair prices, long term relationships

It's been a full month with family gatherings and reunions, 4th of July celebrations and computer upgrades! But Cathy has managed to fit in some reading time, working herself through a book called Brewing Justice: Fair Trade Coffee, Sustainability and Survival by Daniel Jaffee. This month we'll share a bit from the first chapters and over the coming months we'll add other interesting tidbits.

A key concept of Fair Trade is shortening the trading chain by cutting out many of the intermediaries or middlemen such as exporters, importers and brokers. It would be hard to find a "chain" much shorter than ours, unless you travel directly to the coffee farm yourself.

As you know, our coffee comes directly from our family in Honduras and we'll get it directly to you.

Key Concepts of Fair Trade
In Brewing Justice, Daniel Jaffee writes that a central goal of the Fair Trade movement is to "create more direct, socially just, and environmentally responsible trade relations." Fair-trade organizations may describe their standards somewhat differently, but mostly the following criteria apply:

· Guaranteed minimum (floor) prices to producers; fair wages to laborers; social development premium

· Advance credit or payment to producers

· Democratically run producer cooperatives or workplaces

· Long-term contracts and trading relationships

· Environmentally sustainable production practices

· Public accountability and financial transparency

· Financial and technical assistance to producers

· Safe, nonexploitative working conditions.

How does Velasquez Family Coffee implement our version of fair-trade?

First we pay our family members a guaranteed price per pound of unroasted coffee that is far above the minimum price set for fairly traded coffee. Although it has varied by year and the quantity of coffee we purchase, we have consistently paid between $2.00 - $3.00 per pound. (Minimum fair trade price for coffee right now is $1.21, $1.41 for certified organic). We also time our payments to the coffee farmers according to their needs, part in advance of a shipment to help with harvest and to get the coffee ready to ship, and then the rest in payments throughout the year as they need it. (The have told us they prefer not getting it all at once so we act as sort of a savings account for them and the money stays in dollars as long as possible which retains its value a bit better than the Hondura Lempira typically).

Because we are a family, we haven't created a formal democratic cooperative. But we do put our purchase agreements in writing -- and of course our relationship is naturally long-term. We'll write more in future emails about the many sustainability practices that our family members follow, but if you are curious now you can read a bit about that in the About our Coffee part of our website. We'll also touch more on accountability, transparency and worker conditions in the coming months. (We know you have better things to do than spend hours reading our emails!)

Stay Cool! (You can drink your coffee on ice too if you wish! or visit this link for iced coffee recipes if you want something fancier.)