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What's In a Label?

The real meaning of the fair trade label on your gourmet coffee.

Does Fair Trade Eliminate Poverty?

The most frequently used argument for Fair Trade is that it provides small scale producers with the additional income needed to avoid lives mired in poverty. But poverty in coffee growing communities is a multi-faceted problem that cannot be reduced to a simple question of price mechanisms and improved trade relationships.

Fair Trade: What Price for Good Coffee?

Ever since Jesuit monks brought coffee to Guatemala three centuries ago, raising the beans has been a losing business for small farmers. Conditions are miserable — try lugging 100 lb. of fertilizer up a mountain — and even though coffee is the world's second most valuable traded commodity, after oil, the money it brings in is measly.

Kenya's coffee trade falling 'near to irrelevance'

Decades of underinvestment, compounded by successive years of poor weather, are reducing Kenya's once-mighty coffee industry to an irrelevance in world trade.

Kenya's coffee exports, which topped 2m bags in 1990, are on track to fall to less than one-third of that figure in 2010-11, a report from the US Department of Agriculture's Nairobi bureau said.

Brazil Coffee Will Trade at Double Discount of Others, ICE Says

The discount on Brazilian coffee will be more than twice that on the cheapest grades currently deliverable against ICE Futures U.S.’s arabica contract when it gets included from 2013, according to the bourse.

Fair Trade Without the Froth

A dispassionate economic analysis of 'Fair Trade'.

Half a Cheer for Fair Trade

In the twenty-sixth IEA Current Controversies Paper, Philip Booth and Linda Whetstone critically examine the arguments of the fair trade movement.

Black Gold

A documentary film about coffee and trade.

Behind the Fair Trade Label

Although it doesn’t have a universally accepted definition, fair trade is generally understood to be a movement that promotes sustainability in developing countries and tries to pay “fair” prices to the local producers exporting from them — most notably farmers raising coffee, bananas and tea.

Celebrating dissent: Chinese dissident wins Nobel Peace prize

In a move that has infuriated Chinese officials, the Nobel Committee has awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to the jailed dissident writer and famous democracy advocate, Liu Xiaobo.