The Coop seem to bring new products to market at an entirely different pace from its rivals, and has built up an impressive list of ‘Fairtrade firsts’. Following the introduction of the world’s first Fairtrade grapefruits in 2007, they brought us Fairtrade fruit lollies and two smoothies last summer. For the last couple of weeks you’ve been able to buy the first Fairtrade-marked Sparkling Brut from South Africa, and their cotton wool products have just been converted too. This is giving real support to  producer coops in new countries and regions. In particular, some of their coffee comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo, a country rarely mentioned in Fairtrade materials. They also lead the way in using Fairtrade sugar and cocoa as ingredients in composite products.  Last week I found yet another two new chocolate puddings in the freezer section!

Add to this their consistent financial and in-kind support for local Fairtrade initiatives and the total switch of their hot beverages and you get a Fairtrade champion that deserves a lot of credit, which it rarely gets. People like Brad Hill of the Coop, who continue to be agitators in the retail world, should get just as much recognition as the campaigners who maintain demand in their communities. On this note, congratulations to both Sophi Tranchell MBE of Divine and Bruce Crowther MBE of Garstang fame.

I have a bit of an issue with Coop bananas, but I trust it is being worked on! I’ve been told that a total switch would need the support of all the regional Coop societies, and given the profitability of  bananas some of the societies in poorer or more competitive regions of the UK are reluctant to go 100%. Remember that Sainsbury’s boasted that they would absorb over £4 million in costs to make their switch, but then they are a bully-boy giant over three times the size of Coop.

So does my support of the Coop totally contradict what I’ve said below about a reliance on big business to grow the success of Fairtrade? I’m not sure. The Coop is not just like the others. At the moment all the regional societies under the umbrella Cooperative Group make up just over 4% of the UK grocery market, though this will rise to about 8% with its takeover of Somerfield (surely a good thing, Somerfield were hopeless on Fairtrade). More importantly than size is structure, as the Coop is a consumer cooperative, not a corporation. Control of the organisation is democratically controlled by members and each member has one vote (unlike shareholders whose shares equal votes) and profits are distributed according to how much you use the Cooperative’s services. It is, though, still a supermarket, rapidly replacing local corner shops with its centralised distribution model. I’m not sure I can have it both ways. If you feel strongly, please persuade me.

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?

Far more importantly, there is now the potential for smallholder farmers in countries such as Ethiopia, Burma and Paraguay to benefit from minimum prices, stable contracts and a social premium for their community of up to $80 a tonne for organic pulses. Pulses and beans can also be grown in between wheat, rice and other crops, thereby maximising yields and providing income from supplying both local and international markets.

I’d like to think that those with enough of a social conscience to buy Fairtrade also care about their environment.  In September, Rajendra Pachauri, Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) made a first attempt at frankness in relation to meat and climate change.  There is no getting around the fact that a growing world appetite for meat is a major barrier to cutting emissions. Pachauri points to UN figures that show total emissions from meat production far exceeding those of transport (18% and 13% of global emissions respectively). As with so many things, moderation is probably the key but we have somehow to invert ‘Meat-free Mondays’ to a equivalent (‘Chewy Tuesdays’?) where meat is no longer the norm. There is probably a case for local small-scale meat production but there is simply no justification for the rainforest-trashing model that supplies us at the moment.

I doubt that we will see any great increase in enthusiasm for vegetarianism in the ‘hard-up’ year ahead, despite the savings to be made. It would be nice, though, if we could elevate the issue of food to the same level as energy and transport in the climate debate. If food could receive as much media scrutiny as these two sectors  (and move on from simplified damnation of food miles)  then I think the message of climate change could engage and resonate with a much bigger proportion of the world.