In a town about 10 minutes outside of Antigua, Guatemala, is a small coffee plantation.
Mayan natives joke with one another as they plow the coffee beans and blend them for export. These workers labor to put both food on the table and their children through local schools. This is a Fair Trade plantation.
Fair Trade is the cooperation of individual organizations to ensure workers' basic labor rights. It began with a small group of companies all pledging to enforce these ideals and now affects more than one million farmers and their families, according to the Fairtrade Labeling Organization.
It accomplishes this mainly by cutting out the middleman.
In an unregulated market, the coffee travels from the farmer to a middleman to a processor and then to an exporter. Once it leaves the country, it goes to an American broker, then to a main coffee company where it is given to distributors and then finally to the coffee store.
In a Fair Trade market, the coffee goes from the individual farmer to a cooperative and then directly to a Fair Trade firm, which distributes it to coffee stores. This eliminates many fees paid to middlemen, according to Equal Exchange, America's oldest Fair Trade organization.
Fair Trade is not just coffee—fruit, chocolate and even crafts are all included under the same umbrella of fair pricing.
However, according to UW-Madison economics professor Randall Fortenbery, the impact of Fair Trade is certainly not symmetric across products—with coffee being the most lucrative Fair Trade product.
Such popularity has taken root in Madison with many coffee shops serving Fair Trade certified coffee. Fair Trade Coffee House, 418 State St., opened three years ago after recognizing the demand.
""We wanted to promote the politics of where you spend your money,"" said Lori Henn, co-owner of Fair Trade Coffee House. ""Fair Trade is more than just coffee, I see us as a whole movement in Madison.""
Taste isn't compromised either.
""We did blind taste tests and found that we liked [the Fair Trade product] better,"" Henn said. ""I even had a 60-year-old woman come up to me and say this was the best cup of coffee she ever tasted—and she's had a lot of cups of coffee.""
Emma Bohonfoush, a sophomore at UW-Madison, is a self-professed ""coffee snob.""
""The basic principal is the farmers receive an exact rate,"" she said. ""It's better to spend 50 cents more to support someone's lifestyle.""
Equal Exchange prizes the rights of the workers to vote as individuals, serve as leaders and speak their minds.
""The concepts are not exotic or strange, in fact they're in every grade school civics book,"" according to the group's Web site.
The impact is noticeable.
The Fairtrade Labeling Organization has set the World Price at $1.26 per pound. Conversely, unregulated trade often results in the farmer receiving only 15 to 20 cents per pound, according to the Mennonite Central Committee Coffee Project.
UW-Madison history professor Florencia Mallon specializes in modern Latin America and views the Fair Trade Movement as eye opening.
""[With] unequal trade we benefit from cheap labor and poverty in other parts of the world,"" Mallon said. ""For us, it calls attention to the fact that distribution is unequal; we all have bearer responsibility.""
Mallon also believes the effect to be fairly concentrated.
""Part of the limit is the goods that are viable tend to be goods that already have an export market,"" she said. ""The most important of those is coffee.""
Because they lack a big financial cushion, these financial issues become the most important for small, artisan-based producers, Mallon said.
Economic difficulties stretch beyond growers' production costs.Fortenbery said there have been unanticipated consequences with the introduction of the new Fair Trade market, such as an overproduction of goods, which have resulted in a lower quality product.
""There are winners and losers,"" Fortenbery said. ""If you look to impose a minimum price through a fair trade agreement, you will put a downward pressure on the world price.""
Fortenbery added that big coffee corporations have found ways to circumvent the rising costs of coffee.
""Big coffee companies go directly to the producers,"" he said. ""It changed the dynamics of who is playing in the world market, made sense to [big companies] to invest in direct growers.""
According to Fortenbery, this investment has both positive and negative affects.
""It is good if you still have access to the high price market, [but this] reduces price volatility,"" he said. ""Volatility means risk, but it also means opportunity.""
Madison locals still support the Fair Trade movement and believe in the importance of a hard day's work.
""I think it's a great idea. Period,"" said Fair Trade Coffee House patron Phil Thompson. ""Let the person who puts in the toil get a fair share of the profit.""
