Fair trade is a practice that is over-all partial to only small farms. Anyone who follows the Fair Trade policy manual per se (tries to pay their employees a higher wage) yet has a farm above a specified hectare size cannot participate.

What more and more roasters and wholesalers are doing is what some call “relationship coffee” marketing, where they actually visit an area and work with a growers (both large and small) and base their buying decisions based on the growers practices of (1) cultivation, (2) picking (picking just he good cherries and not stripping the plant at each harvest just to sell more pounds of green coffee), and then (3) how they process the cherries. That can either be wet or dry process. Wet processing is faster and cheaper while dry processing is more time consuming but results in a more aromatic product.

Coffee is a very expensive product to produce and at the commodity level ranks higher than oil in world trade.

So to suggest that anyone who doesn’t sell Fair Trade coffee is ignorant or supports slave labor is a comment that says more about a lack of factual knowledge about what the practice of Fair Trade really is. Yes it is a good idea and concept, but the practice is not evenly distributed among all of the coffee growers in any good region.