Have you heard? Starbucks have gone Fairtrade! A massive victory for the movement, right? At last we are going really big – mainstream. In 2009, Starbucks will cement its position as the world’s number one purchaser of Fairtrade coffee, and in the UK all their espresso-based coffee will be Fairtrade-certified. The 18,000 tonnes of Fairtrade coffee Starbucks will buy this year is still only around 13% of their global demand but this will be a gigantic boost to Fairtrade sales figures. By way of contrast, Cafedirect, the UK’s largest 100% Fairtrade company, has just had its most successful year buying just 2,800 tonnes. The trouble is, since the Starbucks news in November, I haven’t been able to rid myself of a niggling worry that something is going a bit wrong with Fairtrade.
Part of it is the company in question. To a great many people, Starbucks is representative of a lot that’s wrong with our towns and cities. Their 700 UK stores (15,000 worldwide) are a major component of the identikit high streets that have all but destroyed the distinctiveness of our shopping communities. Last summer in Edinburgh a new outlet opened on Middle Meadow Walk fewer than one hundred metres from an existing one at the top of the Walk, luring more students away from struggling Union cafes. Starbucks is a prime example of an out-of-control economic model that demands constant growth, gobbling up competition so efficiency savings can be made at ever bigger scales to generate greater (but never sufficient) sales.
Until their ‘conversion’, Starbucks’ commitment to Fairtrade was pretty thin. Just two weeks before at a debate I travelled to in Edinburgh, a Starbucks representative, questioned on the lack of Fairtrade coffee on offer, read from a crib sheet that 1) even if they wanted to go Fairtrade, there wasn’t enough Fairtrade coffee in the world to supply them and 2) that while the ‘Fairtrade price’ was $1.21 per pound, they paid on average $1.43 last year already. In response, 1) is disingenuous – you can work over a set time period to raise your standards with existing producers to get Fairtrade certification (this is what Sainsbury’s did with bananas and Tate & Lyle with sugar) and 2) is a deliberate attempt to confuse – there is obviously a difference between a minimum price and an average one. The Fairtrade minimum is a price floor. When the market price rises above it, the Fairtrade coffee price will always be 10 cents above it (this is the social premium bit). The Starbucks average means that peaks and troughs are bundled together in a snapshot that fails to reflect precisely the sort of instability for farmers that the Fairtrade system is trying to overcome.
Starbucks Fairtrade commitment is only one part of their bigger CSR drive called ‘Shared Planet’. Indeed, the Shared Planet mini-site barely mentions Fairtrade, even in the ‘ethical sourcing’ section. In the US, where the Fairtrade Mark has yet to become as established as in the UK, Starbucks is putting all the focus on its coffee meeting ‘Shared Planet-standards’. Now I don’t know what assurances FLO have been given, but to me this looks like a pretty unsubtle attempt at undermining any future success of the Fairtrade Mark in the US, hidden behind the sweetener of the increase in Fairtrade volumes here.
My greater concern, though, is that this collaboration between the Fairtrade Foundation and Starbucks typifies a direction that the Fairtrade Foundation is increasingly dependent upon to maintain the phenomenal year-on-year growth that it has enjoyed in the last few years. As everyone involved in Fairtrade knows, the average growth in Fairtrade retail sales of 48% every year between 2000 and 2007 has been largely down to the supermarkets and big switches by big brands. Sainsbury’s banana and tea switches more than doubled the Fairtrade market in both. Tate & Lyle’s switch will increase Fairtrade sugar sales tenfold.
Given the scale of these wins, it is understandable why the Foundation is ever more cosy with corporations like Starbucks. They would argue that Fairtrade needs both the supermarkets for volume and the smaller pioneering 100% Fairtrade companies to innovate and push into new areas. This is clearly not sustainable. As the supermarkets’ cheaper Fairtrade own-brands take over the shelves, the pioneers suffer. For instance, Cafedirect say the 5% decline in their retail sales in 2008 is due to supermarket ‘penetration’. The Foundation might respond that their primary concern is getting greater benefits for producers, but I fear they may be shooting themselves in the foot. Is the role of pioneer companies such as Equal Exchange and Traidcraft simply to do the hard work to establish exciting new Fairtrade lines so that the supermarkets can cherry-pick the popular ones and ride the bandwagon? At my most cynical I’d say that the founding companies of the Fairtrade movement are being forced to become vehicles for widespread supermarket greenwash and profit.
Ultimately my question is this: why must the support of small-holders in the poorest parts of the world be conditional on the support of the bully-boy giants (and at the expense of small-retailers) in the richest parts? Or rather, is this the only way?
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