Trade as Relationship

I only drink Fair trade, organic certified coffee.  It is not part of the 100 mile diet.  It is what keeps me awake.  And I have been happy to know that the coffee I buy is certified.

Today I toured Level Ground – a coffee brewer that insists on a word before “fair trade.”   It insists on more than a good price through a broker for fairly traded organic coffee.  It insists on “direct fair trade.”   At Level Ground, they insist on a relationship, without middle men.

Funny that what attracted me to them when I first came across a Level Ground coffee display at the Saanich Fair over Labour Day weekend was their local personnel policies.   Employees at Level Ground receive a bonus for reducing the greenhouse gases incurred in the daily commute to work.  Your biggest bonus is walking or biking to work, but you’ll get a benefit for taking public transit or for car pooling.  They have excellent recycling and reusing policies and operate to high environmental standards locally, as one would expect.  Their reusable tubs for bulk buys have already avoided packaging wasted from 40,000 lbs of coffee a year.  Not bad.

But what really makes them stand out is the insistence on building a relationship with the farmers, their families and communities.  They are supporting over 3,000 families who grow coffee in fives countries: Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, Tanzania and Ethiopia.  Because of the relationship, women in villages on the other side of the world have health care.  Because the relationship is long term, farmers can count on the fair trade buyer from Level Ground.  Economic insecurity is reduced.  Level Ground pays on average more than 50% of what a conventional market coffee broker will pay and more than 25% of what a fair trade broker pays.  This is not to say there is anything “wrong” with the booming certified Fair Trade label.  Fairly traded coffee is raising the price.  It is to say, that the essence of fairly traded commodities – coffee, chocolate, bananas,  --  is the elimination of the middle man.  The broker who makes a profit in the middle.  And when those brokers seek out fairly traded coffee, they pay at the bottom rung of the price deemed “fair.”

Building relationships takes longer.  It makes less money.  But it builds a fairer world.

Level Ground sells through Ten Thousand Villages across Canada and many ways locally.  You can read all about them at www.levelground.com.  Who says you cannot do well by doing good?