Those of us who have the good fortune to live and work in the North Bay enjoy a cornucopia of wonderful things—artisan cheeses, world-class wines and a bevy of talented chefs more than capable of quelling the strongest hunger pangs. We’re blessed with a multitude of cultural opportunities and enthusiastically celebrate our artistic bent. We like our imported coffees and delicate teas, we dress in fine threads and accessorize in gold beads and silver bangles (or vice versa). All in all, we’re a fairly wealthy lot, sharing this very special slice of paradise.
And we’re lucky. While we sip our tea, swirl our wine and give in to the temptations of consumerism, millions of disadvantaged people are living in poverty, exploited by trade policies that hurt many for the benefit of the few.
In response to this injustice, there’s been a groundswell of support across the United States for fair trade practices. The movement advocates payment of a fair price for labor and sets both social and environmental standards related to the production of a wide variety of goods. And it’s gaining real momentum here in the North Bay, as more companies adopt ethical business procedures under the fair trade umbrella.
Live the change
One of the earliest in the North Bay to embrace the concept of fair trade was Richard Wolf, founder and owner of Far Fetched Jewelry Imports in Sebastopol. Wolf was a student at Sonoma State University back in the 1980s, when he read a book by E. F. Schumacher, titled Small Is Beautiful: Economics as If People Mattered.
“I remember one story Schumacher told about cottage industries, relating how Ghandi helped change the economy of India and reduce slums by encouraging artisans to develop and produce crafts in their own communities. This promoted self-sufficiency and combated the migration of people to distant factories,” Wolf says. The book changed Wolf’s life—and provided the impetus for a striking new management philosophy for his fledgling jewelry import business, which he started while still in college.
For more than 20 years, Wolf has employed the principles of fair trade in working with jewelry design and production teams. Far Fetched has a base staff of 12 people in Sebastopol, where the jewelry is designed, marketed and distributed, plus about 20 independent sales representatives across the country.
The jewelry is produced in and around the town of Taxco, Mexico, a famous silver-mining city in the high Sierras of Central Mexico. The work is administered by Far Fetched’s sister company, Cuervo Metal, which is overseen by Wolf’s long-time business associate, Carlos Torres. All the jewelry is created in a cottage industry setting, meaning in the artisans’ homes or neighborhoods. Cuervo works with close to 40 separate workshops totaling close to 100 individual artisans.
“Jewelry making is part of Taxco’s heritage. We’re helping them continue their traditions by providing work through our designs and marketing,” Wolf says. “But we’re also trying to support working in new and different ways. We look for simple ways to improve efficiency, capacity and their overall quality of life.” He notes that Mexican labor is no longer considered cheap, so many jewelry wholesalers that previously worked in Taxco have moved most of their production to China, Bali, Thailand and India.
“We didn’t want to do that. We’ve had a long commitment with these people, and some of our relationships go back more than 20 years and multiple generations,” Wolf says.
Wolf and Torres provide a free centralized workshop, where tools such as cutters and presses are available to all. Often, this equipment is too expensive for an artisan to own individually. Far Fetched also offers some such equipment on consignment, so it can be shared at the smaller workshops or among individuals.
In addition to the centralized workshop, Far Fetched provides free training to educate the artisans on new techniques and safety, and the company conducts monthly meetings of its artisans to discuss production issues. It has also provided interest-free loans to help them invest in their own businesses or with family emergencies (though this practice has recently been curtailed due to interference by the Mexican government, which has demanded more formal documentation) and has set up a reward program for workers’ children who do well in school.
Tea time
While handicrafts and jewelry are some of the “pioneer products” that initially helped bring attention to fair trade issues, there’s been significant growth in fair trade foods, most notably coffee and tea.
Seventeen years ago, Ron Rubin founded the Republic of Tea, a specialty tea business that started out with roughly 10 employees and a line of 20 teas. Today, the company has nearly 100 employees and 200 teas and tea-inspired products. Last May, it moved into its new headquarters in one of the remodeled hangars at Hamilton Landing in Novato.
“Our company is about enriching people’s lives through premium teas, education and innovation,” says Marideth Post, company spokesperson, who carries the title of minister of enlightenment. The company was the first to blend specialty tea, and is credited with sparking the specialty tea revolution that started on the West Coast in the early 1990s.
“Tea is a deep and rich subject with many layers, just like wine,” Post says. “It’s more than 5,000 years old and it’s the second most-consumed beverage in the world, next to water.”
All Republic of Tea teas are fairly traded, and the company is a member of a global group called the Ethical Tea Partnership, which reviews and manages practices, procedures and all issues regarding safety, health care and education of workers at the farm/plantation level. Republic of Tea also has five teas that are certified as fair trade teas by TransFair USA, an Oakland-based organization that certifies and promotes fair trade products.
The entire company buys into the fair trade concept, sending a contingent of “ministers” (aka employees) each spring to visit at least one overseas tea garden. Last year, they went to China and Taiwan. In previous years, they’ve been to Japan, India and South Africa.
“Our minister of tea [owner Ron Rubin] feels we should understand tea from the soil to the cup,” explains Post. “We’ve actually plucked tea side-by-side with workers. If you do that for 10 minutes, you’ll see how difficult that job can be, and you have a real appreciation for the product.” Ministers not only visit the gardens, they also spend time in the local area to learn more about the culture.
“With education comes sensitivity to things like worker conditions,” Post says. “It’s life-changing for all of us. When you’re sitting in the attic of a barn, which is someone’s home, outside a town with no name and the villagers are fixing lunch for you over an open flame in the center of the room, it’s remarkable. The best travel company in the world couldn’t provide you with a more exclusive, intimate experience. It’s so powerful.”
And the trips aren’t always straightforward. Lodging isn’t always guaranteed, and often, the gardens are in remote locations, so it can literally take a series of planes, trains and automobiles to reach them.
Post says her experiences have left her more conscious of what it takes to get a product to market. “I’ve learned not to take anything for granted,” she says.
Java jive
Another Marin-based company with strong ties to the fair trade movement is Equator Coffees in San Rafael. Company cofounder and master roaster Brooke McDonnell started the company in 1995 after “hanging out in North Beach coffee houses” when she was in her 20s and owning two espresso bars in the early 1990s. The company has 16 employees in San Rafael and Sacramento and its coffees are sold in bakeries, cafes, restaurants, boutique markets and hotels, mostly on the West Coast, but also in a few spots on the Eastern Seaboard and in the Midwest.
She became interested in fair trade practices after sitting in on a presentation given by TransFair founder Paul Rice in 1999. “Personally, I found it to be an electrifying presentation that won over hearts and minds. It really brought to light the small farmers left behind in the specialty coffee boom and created a way to buy from, and work with, these farmers,” McDonnell says. “I was amazed how many people were involved—at least half a million in Latin America alone—and I felt they should participate in the boom.”
McDonnell believes visionaries need “good lieutenants on the ground to enable their policies.” She found a mentor in Kimberly Easson of TransFair, who helped her with practical applications. “She inspired me to develop more direct trade relationships, which reward producers with premium prices for their effort,” McDonnell explains. “If people get a fair price, they’ll reinvest in mills. The infrastructure and the quality will be elevated and, in the end, we have greater access to good coffee. It just makes sense.”
McDonnell has visited coffee growers in Latin America and India, and she has plans to visit Ethiopia. One of the best trips she’s taken was an event in Costa Rica, sponsored by Sustainable Harvest International, designed to connect roasters directly with growers around the world.
“Roasters met with producers in Costa Rica, Colombia, Ecuador and other countries, often forging new partnerships with a handshake across a table. It was fantastic to meet them and find out what their particular issues are,” she says. “One size doesn’t fit all. Each producer deals with microclimates, political issues and all sorts of challenges.”
Equator Coffees also has provided direct micro-credit to producers, building a cupping lab for one. “The cupping lab lets them roast green coffee samples to evaluate quality. If they have the knowledge, they can make better decisions about farming. By testing the green samples, they can identify lots of land that are producing higher-quality beans, and they can concentrate on those,” McDonnell explains.
McDonnell’s experience led Equator Coffees to purchase land in Panama to raise special varieties of coffee. “Now we get to confront the farmers’ issues head-on, with all the challenges. We hope to be producing a viable crop in three to four years,” she says. “We’ve gone from retail to wholesale to growing. I’m from New York City, and when I was growing up, we didn’t even have a plant at home. Now here I am in the highlands of Panama.”
A tropical connection
Another fair trade devotee is Chris Mann, CEO of Guayaki, which imports Yerba Maté, a beverage made from the leaves and stems of a rainforest tree that grows in South America. Mann describes it as a drink with a “stronger, more stimulating profile like coffee, but made from green leaves like tea. It rivals coffee, but it’s not overwhelming and you don’t get the crash.”
Guayaki, which relocated to Sebastopol from San Luis Obispo nearly four years ago, was co-founded by David Karr of California and Alex Pryor of Argentina. The two were food science students at Cal Poly University, and Guayaki was their senior project. Pryor maintains an office in Argentina and manages the supply side of the business.
According to Mann, Guayaki works with small family farmers and pays them two to three times the going rate for their labor. For this fee, the farmers are required to manage the rainforests in a specified manner and restore it to a certain level. They also need to provide health benefits and to hire their workers legally.
“Lots of time, they prefer to get paid under the table so they can avoid paying taxes,” Mann says. “But when they do that, they usually don’t get paid minimum wage and they don’t get any benefits. So we require them to be legally hired and trained. We also provide three pairs of uniforms, which we maintain. Lots of them were working in their own clothes, which would get ripped and would have to be replaced. We also provide bus transit so they don’t have to pile into the back of a truck or hitchhike. We give them equipment—cutters, clippers, machetes and, most important, boots. We provide lunch and training. We also provide bathrooms. What we’ve noticed with the workers is that sometimes they don’t recognize what’s been missing from their lives, simply because they’re not used to the higher standards.”
The company is also working with a community of the Ache Guayaki people (from which the company derives its name) in one of the first indigenously run, sustainable preserves.
“Our company is named after the Ache Guayaki, and our partnership with them is a good example of our social justice mission,” says company co-founder Karr. “This tribe was driven from its lands and subjected to genocide in the 1970s, and it’s struggling and trying to regroup in the rainforest of Paraguay. For several years, the Ache has partnered with our company on sustainable agriculture projects. We have planted thousands of yerba mate trees below the rainforest canopy to provide them with future economic means. The inaugural harvest will be in 2009. Guayaki also has provided the initial capital to provide salaries, training, tools and technical assistance and has helped establish a yerba mate tree nursery that the community uses to supply other farms in the region. We also pay the tribe royalties for the honor of using its Guayaki Ache tribal name as a brand.”
“But we don’t want them to be solely dependent on maté, so we also have them growing sesame seeds to sell to co-ops,” Mann says. “And we’re making arrangements for them to get consulting contracts with other indigenous tribes that want to do the same. It’s amazing what you can do with a little information and a little money. And when you’re working with people who haven’t had access to benefits, and who are now being valued for who they are and the work they do, the results are astonishing. They’re passionate, and they’re so willing to learn, grow and share.”
The retail angle
Those active within the fair trade movement point out that there are plenty of artisan producers able to provide product—and a significant number of companies that want to import the goods—but there’s a bottleneck at the retail level.
One of the most successful fair trade retail operations in the North Bay is Baksheesh, which features crafts and other items from nearly 40 developing countries in its stores in Sonoma and St. Helena. Baksheesh is owned by Brian and Candi Smucker. A third store, located in Healdsburg, has been spun off into its own entity under the eye of Annette Pereira, a former business partner.
Candi was the manager of a Chicago church store that sold fair trade goods in the late 1980s. In 1991, Brian became involved as a board member and volunteer (and married Candi in the process). The duo eventually found employment with Ten Thousand Villages, one of the oldest and largest retailers of fair trade products in North America, helping to develop a model for establishing large-scale stores in major urban areas. (Fair trade stores have historically been very small. “Large-scale” for a fair trade store in the 1990s meant budgeting for $240,000 in first year sales.)
When the couple moved to Sonoma in 1997, they brought their knowledge with them and opened the first Baksheesh, located on the historic Sonoma Plaza. Brian continued his position for Ten Thousand Villages for another year before joining his wife at Baksheesh. Pereira showed up as a frequent shopper and eventually became their partner. They opened a second store on the plaza in Healdsburg in 2003 and a third one on Main Street in St. Helena in 2007. Baksheesh is a member of Fair Trade federation, a North American fair trade organization that pre-screens artisans and wholesalers.
“We buy product solely from the groups they select, because we know they’ve gone through a detailed, extensive screening process,” Brian explains. To be included on their list of accepted producers, they have to provide “full information and documentation about pay, working conditions and even what steps they take once certain products become less saleable. In other words, they make sure they actually walk the talk,” he says. “They’re in constant contact with the artisans, and they notice if the head of a village suddenly has a nice new house and the other folks aren’t so lucky.”
Brian and Candi have personally visited about 19 of the countries represented in their stores, taking trips about once a year; Pereira has traveled to several countries as well. “We meet directly with the artisans in their homes and workshops. We’ve heard some incredible stories about very poor people who can now send all their kids to school. People who no longer have to choose between putting food on the table or getting their sick child medical care,” Brian says. The personal visits are good for business as well. “They ask us lots of questions,” he says. “They want to know what our customers want, what colors they like and what more they can make that we can sell.”
The typical Baksheesh customer is a female, from the middle or upper middle class, who is well-educated and well-traveled. Brian says the stores also have a good following from small children and folks from the lower income strata who like low prices.
“Our goal isn’t to make a lot of money, but to sell a lot of products. Our customers like the fact that [with their purchases] they’re helping others,” he says.
Jewelry and personal accessories are the most popular items, but there’s also great interest in recycled products. The number one selling article in the stores is a trivet made out of old newspapers from the Philippines. Other popular items include a bowl made from recycled magazines in Vietnam and finger puppets from Peru. Some of the more unique products are a nativity from Haiti, fashioned from a recycled oil drum, and kaisa grass baskets from Bangladesh.
All three stores are in prime retail locations, which Brian believes to be an important factor in their success. “We’ve defined our mission to grow fair trade as much as we can, so it’s been important for us to take a bigger risk and go for prime locations to get more traffic. We could have tried to save on rent by picking less-trafficked areas, but we’d also lose a big chunk of our customers,” he says.
Their mission doesn’t end with their own stores. According to Brian, the trio has been able to share its startup expertise with others interested in fair trade. He estimates they’ve helped about six to eight other stores get up and running across the United States.
Evolution of the revolution
The evolution of fair trade practices hasn’t been all smooth sailing. Jonathan Rosenthal is a fair trade pioneer who, in 1986, was one of the founders of Equal Exchange—an alternative trade company that partners with small farmers in developing countries who use sustainable agriculture practices. He’s been a mentor to Chris Mann at Guayaki and recently stepped down as the CEO of Oké USA in Watertown, Massachusetts, one of the nation’s largest importers of fair trade bananas.
He traces the origin of modern fair trade to post World War II, when the Mennonites and Church of the Brethren worked with artisans in Puerto Rico and imported their wares for sale in the United States. At the same time, other religious groups worked with refugees in Europe. “From the 1940s to 1960s, most fair trade work was based in faith-based communities, especially the peace churches, such as the Church of the Brethren and the Mennonites. Churches worked with poor people who produced handcrafted items that were sold at church bazaars or holiday sales,” Rosenthal says.
The movement started to change in the 1970s and into the 1980s, becoming more political in nature. It grew even larger in the 1990s, when the demand for specialty coffees surged worldwide and many of the coffee farms were in developing countries. It also got help from an unlikely source—the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center, which is part of the National Zoo.
“The Smithsonian folks were concerned, because migratory birds were disappearing due to loss of habitats,” Rosenthal explains. “The key issue was deforestation, because coffee farmers were cutting down shade trees to grow coffee in the sun. They wanted to get the story out, and knew there were 60 million birders in the United States. At the same time, there was a huge explosion of interest in the rainforests—people got passionate about saving the rainforests. I’ve worried that people are more interested in trees and birds than they are in poor people.”
The idea for a super seal of approval for coffee that met all the standards—organic, bird-friendly, mindful of rainforests and grown using fair trade practices—was born, but the coalition (Equal Exchange, Fort Bragg-based Thanksgiving Coffee, Rainforest Alliance, Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center and the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy) never got off the ground.
“They were all at the table, and they all wanted the super seal. But they had no money, so they had a tough time,” Rosenthal says. A few years later, in 1998, TransFair USA was born, and the super seal became a reality.
“It took fair trade to a whole other level,” Rosenthal says. “At the time, Equal Exchange was selling about 2 million pounds of fair trade coffee. This year, they’re projected to sell 100 million pounds.”
When Fairtrade Labeling Organizations International (FLO) issued its annual report in 2008, it estimated fair trade certified sales (those that meet the highest standards and are labeled as such) were $3.62 billion worldwide, which was a 47 percent year-to-year increase. Today, FLO estimates more than 7.5 million disadvantaged producers and their families are benefiting from fair trade-funded infrastructure, technical assistance and community development projects. By all indications, the trend should continue to grow—but Rosenthal is leery.
“A lot depends on how far down the economy goes,” he says. “Surplus money to pay extra for things is decreasing. And some people will just have to cut it out all together. For example, I know there are a lot of churches currently buying fair trade coffee because they’re convinced it’s worth it for spiritual reasons. If things continue to slide, they might have to go back to buying Maxwell House because they need the extra money for the food pantry.”
Equator Coffee’s McDonnell admits that everyone is “holding their breath” to see what happens in the first quarter of 2009 and what impact the current economic crisis will have on the fair trade business. During the fourth quarter of 2008, only one or two of Equator Coffee’s 100 accounts declined to order the higher priced, certified free trade coffee, and McDonnell says her business was “healthy and robust” with no declines in mail orders.
“What might happen in the coffee business is that consumers will continue to purchase the higher end coffee and take it home to brew it,” instead of paying a higher price to consume it at a café, she explains. And those coffee drinkers who pop for two cups a day might drop down to just one cup a day.
“Right now, I’m an optimist,” she continues. “I truly think things will hold steady, and there won’t be too much retrenchment.”
