The idea behind the fair trade movement is simple: paying people a decent wage for their work.
The past 15 years have been a time of tremendous growth for the coffee industry. Demand for coffee increased tremendously-the price for one serving climbing upwards of $4. Why in this time of growth were coffee farmers around the word suffering from malnutrition and increasing debt? Where was all this money going, if not to the farmer? These questions are of the sort the fair trade movement attempts to answer and solve. If we pay $4 for a coffee and a farmer makes less than .50 cents per pound of coffee produced, there is a leak in the cup somewhere. Fair trade helps this problem by cutting out the layers, upon layers of middlemen in the distribution chain and guaranteeing that the farmer receives at least a minimum price per pound of coffee grown, picked, dried, husked, re-dried, sorted and sold. No small amount of work.
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