I just found out that what I have been talking about the past few months—providing a more direct route from rural sellers to end buyer and giving an honest wage to the farmer or initial producer who does most of the hard work—is actually a hot topic in the world of global trade and development these days, especially for consumable, specialty products like coffee and tea. So, I want to give myself a big welcome to the world of "fair trade" products.
I have been heading there for some time, but only now find out the name of this brave new world. The object of fair trade goods is to assure that the farmer receives an acceptable wage for the goods produced. Sounds reasonable, right? The problem is that for years, especially with products in such high demand as coffee, the big companies (most of them are not even names you would necessarily associate with coffee) have managed to starve farmers, provide end customers with stale product, and make their billions.
It is a bit strange that I have been doing a job without even knowing the name for it, but when we consider the route I have taken, it is a bit more understandable. I have not come at this from a "I know what fair trade is, and I want to go help those farmers in China" standpoint, but rather, live and work here already, know the situation, know the farmers, and have come to realize the situation is a little "off".
Now, I do not want to suggest that the farmers here have anywhere near the plight of many of the world's coffee farmers, as displayed in the recent movie Black Gold. As I hinted above, the coffee situation is quite different from tea: coffee is in higher demand by richer countries with bigger companies marketing.
As I have talked much about before, though, the green tea farmers here are certainly not getting what they should. Just as Vietnamese coffee exports, which exploded ten fold in ten years, are used as filler for big name coffees, so local green tea is bought for almost nothing and used to fill up the popular green teas from well-known tea producing areas in Eastern China.
Around here, it is less an issue of the farmers starving just to provide social drinks to the West, and more an issue of empowering them to take business into their own hands, explore direct trade opportunities, and strengthen their income level to what it could be. They know tea, but they know nothing of tea beyond this county's borders, and that can change.
