When you go shopping at the grocery store, you might notice the black and white Fair Trade label on some coffees, but Fair Trade is a lot more than just a label on a bag, it’s a social movement and market based approach to help farmers and coffee producers in third world countries. Fair Trade creates a mutually beneficial partnership between us, the people who drink the coffee and the people who make it.

It works by cutting out the middlemen and paying the small farmers and independent producers a fair price for their coffee beans. It promotes sustainability and helps the poorer producers and workers become more self-sufficient economically.

It ensures that the producers receive a living minimum wage of $1.26 per pound, no mater what the current market price. Gourmet coffee, which costs more is becoming more and more popular, but farmers in many countries are still making as little as fifty cents per pound. Read the rest of this entry »

The objective of Fair Trade Coffee is to ensure that those who are involved in harvesting and organizing the coffee bean products get a fair treatment. It’s not that all those who participate in this organization use only the finest coffee beans. Rather, Fair Trade Coffee is all about producing coffee in a manner that differs from the way regular coffee beans are done.

Americans are known for their penchant for coffee, so much that a cup of this delicious brew is a must for them to begin the day in the right earnest. However, in spite of all the popularity that coffee enjoys, the product remains shrouded in mystery for most of them, so that they don’t have any idea as to what goes on before the coffee eventually lands up on the store racks. It seems Americans are only interested in drinking the stuff, without getting into things like how the product is produced, harvested and shipped, things that you can come to know of from this way of producing coffee. Read the rest of this entry »