Just coffee

BC spawns a hotbed of ethical coffee entrepreneurs. Meet the passionate brains behind several of the province's coffee fair-traders—and learn why you should never turn down a cup of coffee from Yemen

In an industrial wasteland just on the Vancouver side of Boundary Road, in the shadow of Highway 1 north of First Avenue, a lime green storefront stands out conspicuously against the monotonous grey warehouses and low-rise office clusters.

Steam fogs the windows inside the Ethical Bean Café on this January morning as the espresso machines and milk frothers work double-time to serve up lattes and macchiatos to a lineup of customers that doesn’t seem to diminish, no matter how fast the twenty-something servers dish up the steaming drinks.

The lineup and the buzz of activity will remain constant throughout most of the day, Ethical Bean owner and president Lloyd Bernhardt tells me, shaking his head in disbelief. When he and partner Kim Schacte decided to expand operations into a new LEED-certified, carbon-neutral roastery, the café wasn’t envisioned as a social hub serving the warren of surrounding industrial buildings. The idea was more a sampling bar and training centre for the independent café owners who are Ethical Bean’s clients.

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Coffee Talk – What makes your favourite cafe so great?

Becoming Fair Trade – A run down on the certification process.

The café’s unexpected success is testament to Vancouver’s seemingly insatiable demand for premium coffee. And, more specifically, Ethical Bean is catering to a niche within that market for ethically sourced, or fair-trade coffee. It’s a niche that has mushroomed throughout B.C. over the past decade: turn over a rock in B.C.’s backcountry, and you’re likely to find a free-spirited entrepreneur who has devoted his or her life to not only pursuing the perfect cup of coffee, but to redressing the balance between rich countries, where we happily pay upwards of $15 a pound for premium coffee, and the developing countries that grow it, where farmers often realize only pennies on the pound.

From Invermere to Nelson, to Saltspring Island, the air is filled with the nutty, slightly acrid smell of roasting beans as companies such as Kicking Horse Coffee, Oso Negro and Salt Spring Roasting Co. collectively churn out close to two million pounds of fair-trade coffee a year. The beans are roasted in small batches, each bag is sealed by hand, and the raw beans are often hand-selected by owners who visit the growers in person, forging relationships with families and communities, guaranteeing that a fair portion of the $15 you and I pay goes toward schools, business development, and other community benefits.

These fair-trade coffee roasters aren’t your typical entrepreneur; they aren’t driven by business plans charting multi-year growth curves. There seems to be something about coffee – and about B.C. – that attracts the pure at heart, for whom there’s nothing more important than a fair deal, a superb cup of coffee, and the opportunity to enjoy life in B.C.’s spectacular natural setting.

But are they really making a difference? Have these fair-trade pioneers spawned an uprising of consumer awareness and are they making a significant difference in the developing countries that feed our conspicuous consumption? Or is the fair-trade logo on a bag of coffee just another marketing ploy, soothing the conscience of oblivious consumers?

In Canada, the most common mark of fair trade is the black and white logo sanctioned by Transfair Canada. Transfair is the Canadian licensing body for Fairtrade Labelling Organizations International, commonly referred to as FLO. In order to use the logo and label its coffee as “fair trade certified,” a roaster has to agree to abide by a set of standards devised by FLO, and to submit to regular audits to ensure compliance. These standards demand that buyers deal only with small farmers that have formed member-controlled co-op type organizations, and whose workers are organized, typically in unions. FLO also determines a minimum “fair” price to be paid to the co-ops for green coffee beans, currently sitting at about US$1.25 a pound. It also adds a “fair-trade premium” of US $0.10 a pound, which goes to the co-op, to spend on community development as it sees fit. (If a roaster would also like its beans to be certified organic, FLO will tack on an additional US$0.20 premium, and ensure that the beans meet FLO organic standards.)

“Really what we’re talking about is building up firms in the form of co-operatives,” explains Fairtrade Canada spokes-person Michael Zelmer. He traces FLO certification back to the 1980s, when large-scale political and economic reforms, particularly in Central America, were undermining a history of state support for farming cooperatives. “There was a historical moment there,” he says. “Farmers could possibly take advantage of some of the deregulation that was occurring by being able to grab more of the supply chain, or they could just fail completely because the supports that had been there for cooperatives were being knocked out from under them and large companies were then able to move in.”

At the extreme end of the local fair-trade coffee movement is Level Ground Trading Ltd. of Victoria, which eschews FLO certification, and instead takes pains to label its coffee “direct fair trade.” Co-owner Stacey Toews is concerned about exploitation of developing- world farmers, but doesn’t see the culprit as the World Bank or other agents of deregulation; he places blame on the brokers who act as middlemen between farmers and retailers. “Every broker makes money by buying low and selling high, and the fair trade movement hasn’t really corrected that problem,” says Toews.

Stats for the total fair-trade coffee sold
in Canada and B.C.

To truly qualify as fair trade, according to Toews, a coffee roaster has to buy directly from the source: “The idea of fair trade is you collapse the trade train, personalize and humanize the trade, and in so doing you make a connection between the consumer and the producer.” Fair-trade certification is fine, says Toews, but it only sets a minimum standard: “It’s like saying we’ve always paid minimum wage in B.C. The government sets a price, but that doesn’t mean it’s livable; it means it’s legal.”

The danger with certification, says Toews is that seeing the logo on a bag of coffee can lead to complacency. The problem isn’t the small roasters, many of whom are already committed to premium quality coffee and treating their suppliers fairly; it’s the big corporations that can simply factor the minimum certification standards into their business plans.

“People need to look to Europe, where the biggest players in the market are the very companies whose practices sparked the rise of the fair-trade movement: global multinationals seen as unethical,” says Toews. “They’re the ones best equipped to secure masses of product by meeting the minimum fair trade prices. Big volumes just squeaking under the bar are being recognized as fair trade – and consumers are buying it en masse because it’s the least expensive ethical make-me-feel-good product.”