Does the Fair Trade system work with large plantations?
Fair Trade is fundamentally focused on the small farmer, the producer of the great majority of the world’s coffee. Therefore, it cannot address all of the social inequities associated with coffee production around the world. As noted earlier, by deliberately excluding plantations from the Fair Trade coffee market, the movement does little to improve the lot of landless farmworkers employed on those estates. In contrast, in the case of tea and bananas, two largely plantation-grown crops, Fair Traders have developed criteria that address wages, living and working conditions of farmworkers, the right to organize, and even mechanisms for profit-sharing. Fair Trade inspectors report that monitoring and verification of fulfillment of these criteria for large estates are more challenging tasks than with small farmer cooperatives. Nevertheless, Fair Trade labelers made a political decision to engage the large-estate sector in the case of these two commodities. However, there has been contentio
