The Impact of Fair Trade on Producers and Their Organisations: A Case Study with Coocafé in Costa Rica

Fair Trade attempts to address the poverty issues of small Southern producers through the payment of a ‘fair price’ for their goods and the provision of support services for producer organisations. Although Fair Trade is overwhelmingly identified with the ‘fair price’ paid by participating importers and buyers, sketching the possible avenues of impact reveal that many of the effects of Fair Trade on the quality of life of producers are felt through the organisational development supported by Fair Trade organisations. This study examines the impact of 10 years of Fair Trade in coffee in Costa Rica and reveals the importance of organisational development support for the stakeholders of the nine Costa Rican coffee co-operatives.

Fairtrade and market failures in agricultural commodity markets

This paper concerns an NGO intervention in agricultural commodity markets known as Fairtrade. Fairtrade pays producers a minimum unit price and provides capacity building support to member cooperative organizations. Fairtrade's organizational capacity support targets those factors believed to reduce the commodity producer's share of returns. Specifically, Fairtrade justifies its intervention in markets like coffee by claiming that market power and a lack of capacity in producer organizations'marks down'the prices producers receive. As the market share of Fairtrade coffee grows in importance, its intervention in commodity markets is of increasing interest. Using an original data set collected from fieldwork in Costa Rica, this paper assesses the role of Fairtrade in overcoming the market factors it claims limits producer returns. Features of the Costa Rican input market for coffee permit a generalization of the results. The empirical results find that market power is a limiting factor in the Costa Rican market and that Fairtrade does improve the efficiency of cooperatives, thereby increasing the returns to producers. These results do not depend on the minimum price policy of Fairtrade and therefore can inform on its organizational support activities. Finally, the results also suggest that producers selling to vertically integrated, multinational coffee mills face lower producer price'mark-downs'compared with domestically owned non-cooperative mills. This result contradicts the popular view that the increasing concentration of vertically integrated multinational firms accounts for a decline in producers'share of coffee returns.Markets and Market Access,Crops&Crop Management Systems,Access to Markets,Commodities,Economic Theory&Research

Can Sustainable Livestock Systems and Alternative Proteins Address the Climate Crisis? Presentations

Climate change is severely impacting our food systems, making it increasingly challenging to provide food security and healthy diets for all people. At the same time, food systems contribute 25–30% of all greenhouse gas emissions. The livestock sector alone contributes about half of these GHGs, and has a large land and water footprint. The livestock sector is also the fastest growing agricultural sector in Africa and other parts of the Global South, where access to healthy, affordable milk, meat, and egg remains low. Clearly food system adaptation, including in the livestock sector, must deliver both mitigation and healthy diets. The CGIAR’s 2023 Achieving Agriculture Breakthrough report identifies seven key technological areas and approaches for driving real change in the agriculture sector. Three of these are related to livestock: reducing methane emissions from livestock, livestock breeding for climate resilience, and alternative proteins to replace traditional animal-source proteins. The third seminar of the CGIAR Policy Seminar Series on Strengthening Food Systems will delve into findings and recommendations around sustainable livestock technologies, healthy diets, methane emissions, and alternative proteins, including promising initiatives and technologies that can be pursued to address climate change and healthy diets

Does Fair Trade Deliver on Its Core Value Proposition? Effects on Income, Educational Attainment, and Health in Three Countries

Alternative trade organizations (ATOs) based on philosophies of social justice and/or environmental well-being are establishing new channels of trade and marketing. Partisans promote ATOs as systems to transfer benefits from consumers in the wealthy northern hemisphere to producers in the poor southern hemisphere. The central public policy question is whether the well-being of poor agricultural producers in the southern hemisphere is actually being improved by fair-trade practices, or are consumers who buy products on this premise deceived? The research reported here partially answers the question whether participation in a fair-trade coffee marketing channel delivers benefits to smallscale producers in Latin America. The authors employ a survey methodology to compare TransFair USA (TF) cooperative participants and nonparticipating farmers in three countries on socioeconomic indicators of well-being. According to the analysis, the economic effects of fair-trade participation are unassailable; the effects on educational and health outcomes are uneven. However, TF cooperative participation positively affects educational attainment and the likelihood that a child is currently studying. The authors find positive health-related consequences of TF cooperative participation