Does Fairtrade mean quality beans? Photograph: Newscast.
I'm just back from the mountains of southern Brazil, where the Italian coffee company illycaffe was keen to show me and other journalists its close - and ethical - relationship with coffee farmers.
Speaking from his green paradise of great mountains, swooping valleys and an artificial lake, Edil Anacleto Miranda, a 65-year-old farmer in Araponga, said illy pays him 340 Brazilian real (£88) for a bag of coffee, compared to the 240 real (£62) he receives from other companies.
There's a "but" coming ...
Illy coffee does not carry the Fairtrade mark, the stamp of approval probably best known to ethically conscious shoppers.
Why not? The company's press pack carried the following explanation: 'Fair Trade (FT) is not a third party certification and it could not certify illycaffe's current processes aimed at sourcing the best Arabica coffee in the market.
'This is because FT certifies the growers and their price policy but does not take into account the quality of the coffee produced. As a consequence, illycaffe cannot be certified FT unless it buys coffee from FT coffee growers. To do so, it would mean to betray its own mission - to produce the finest quality espresso.'
Convinced?
The notion that Fairtrade does not equal high quality echoes remarks made by Geoff Watts, a director of Intelligentsia Coffee in the US, who believes the collectivisation of small farmers, which Fairtrade encourages, 'disincentivises the hardest workers. In the end what you get is coffee that is solidly mediocre. 'Intelligentsia Coffee has ended its partnership with Fairtrade and set up its own certification process.
So, is the Fairtrade Foundation facing a crisis of confidence? Sales are growing year on year but so are the criticisms. Earlier this month a Guardian article asked whether the Fairtrade label is quite the guarantee of good practice that we imagine.
Ian Bretman, deputy director of the Fairtrade Foundation in the UK, told me: 'We've never claimed that Fairtrade is perfect but we can guarantee that producers have been paid a minimum price. Where it's working well, it's working very well. Nobody is offering a better alternative and we are always looking at how much more we could be doing.'
In tomorrow's Observer I'll be writing about Black Gold, a film about the inequalities of the global coffee industry which has put the multinationals on the backfoot and opens in Britain next month. It was made by Nick Francis and his brother Marc, who says of Fairtrade, 'About 0.2% of Nestle's coffee falls under the Fairtrade umbrella, and only in the really big supermarkets will you find it.
'There is a big debate in the offing: should Fairtrade endorse a company that is far from ethical? Does it do a disservice to a consumer at the end of the day?'
So from questions of quality control to issues over the firms it endorses, it seems that the Fairtrade system may be in need of a rethink.
