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Enjoyment with a Clear Conscience: Fair Trade Tea

Traditional tea has a bitter aftertaste: pesticide pollution and exploitation on the plantations. If you shop responsibly, you can do something about it. However, there is not one all-round good alternative – there are many different initiatives.

If you don’t just want to drink tea (black tea, green tea, white tea, oolong) but want to enjoy it with a clear conscience, you should follow two pieces of advice: Buy organic tea, because the pesticide load there is significantly lower. Also make sure that you really only buy fairly traded tea, because that way you can also counteract the problematic working conditions.

The problem: making a clear recommendation for “fair trade” tea is not that easy. In addition to the well-known and widespread Fairtrade seal, there is an almost unmanageable variety of initiatives. We present a small selection.

Fairtrade: higher wages, fairer conditions

The Fairtrade seal stands for better working conditions in the production countries. An important tool is the Fairtrade premium: it is paid to the local workers’ cooperative or workers’ representation and used for charitable purposes. Fairtrade prohibits discrimination, forced and child labor and requires occupational safety measures and formal employment relationships. Genetic engineering is excluded, the use of pesticides is severely restricted. There is an extra premium for organic cultivation.

The price that producers receive for their tea depends on the quality, origin and processing methods. Due to the included Fairtrade surcharge, however, it is generally slightly higher than without certification.

According to Fairtrade, the wages of the workers must be at least as high as the standard industry wages or statutory minimum wages, whichever is higher. If these are below living wages, there must be continuous wage increases. However, what is considered to be “living wage” has not yet been clearly defined. “There is currently no uniform living wage calculation system, but we are aiming for it,” says Verena Albert from the policy department of the fair trade company GEPA (see below).

Fairtrade does not guarantee physical traceability for tea. This means: If you buy 100 grams of tea with the Fairtrade seal, the pack does not necessarily have to contain 100 grams of Fairtrade tea, it can also contain conventional tea. The only thing that is certain is that the tea manufacturer bought 100 grams of Fairtrade tea – this is guaranteed by the umbrella organization FLO (Fair Labor Organisation).

Buying: Fairtrade products are available almost everywhere: in supermarkets, discounters, organic shops and supermarkets, health food stores, world shops, drugstores and in many online shops.

GEPA: stricter rules, better traceability

At GEPA, the standards go beyond those of Fairtrade. The company also does public relations and lobbying for fair trade and is a member of FLO and WFTO (World Fair Trade Organization).

A long-term trading partner of GEPA is the Indian tea producer TPI. The company pays its employees above minimum wage for every kilo of tea they pick and also invests in a pension fund for them. Unlike many other plantation operations, TPI employs workers year-round, providing them with education, health care, and electricity.

The price that GEPA pays the producers is based on their calculations; they receive a fair trade surcharge per kilo. After all, around 80 percent of all goods at GEPA come from organic cultivation. Many of the teas bear the seal of the Naturland cultivation association.

GEPA guarantees that there will be no balancing of quantities for tea. For consumers, this means that GEPA tea packs actually contain 100 percent tea from certified tea gardens. “Physical traceability is very important to us. It helps to promote not only fair trade in the minds of the people here, but above all the local producers,” says Verena Albert from GEPA.

El Puente: special support for disadvantaged groups

The non-profit El Puente focuses on trading with self-governing smallholder cooperatives and family businesses. Unlike Fairtrade International and GEPA, El Puente provides producers with up to 100 percent interest-free pre-financing of production.

The company works according to the standards of the WFTO: It makes the special support of disadvantaged groups in the producer countries a central criterion. Wages must correspond to the respective statutory minimum wages or the wages customary in the industry, whichever is higher. Living wages are also “desired” here.

According to their own statements, about 80 percent of the food range is certified organic. El Puente gets its tea from cooperatives in India, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Rwanda.

Buying: The products can only be found in world shops or online so far.

Direct Trade

Initiatives such as the Tea Alternative and the Tea Campaign buy certified organic tea directly from plantations in India, ship it to Germany and sell it directly to consumers in bulk. The tea alternative offers only one type of tea (Assam), the tea campaign two (Darjeeling and Assam); both support the respective region to a special degree. They can offer their products relatively inexpensively by bypassing middlemen, certifiers and complicated marketing structures.

The plantations from which the two direct traders get their tea are mostly FLO-certified. During visits to India, the companies regularly convince themselves that the workers are treated fairly. “The advantage is that I know exactly where the tea comes from and who benefits from it,” says Thomas Zimmermann from the tea alternative. “When I’m there, I look behind practically every machine.” Both initiatives support charitable projects in India with part of their proceeds.

Conclusion: Enjoying fair tea is possible

We believe: every step counts. And that’s why the most important thing is that you do something at all to counteract exploitation and environmental destruction on the tea plantations. The alternatives presented may not be perfect, but they are relatively easy to put into practice for every tea fan and just as useful as they are worthy of support.

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Food

Sweet Revolution – Stand Up for Fair Cocoa!

From biscuits to bars to pralines, the selection of chocolate products is huge, as is the demand: consumers in Europe eat around nine kilograms per capita and per year. Often without knowing the questionable conditions under which cocoa is grown. To change that, Fairtrade is launching the Sweet Revolution, a protest campaign for fair cocoa. Join us!

In everyday life, many chocolate lovers think more about the calorie content of their favorite bar of chocolate than about the origin of the cocoa beans. Extreme poverty, exploitation and child labor are part of the bitter reality of cocoa cultivation. About 14 million people make their living from the production of cocoa – mainly smallholder families who cultivate less than five hectares of land. The small area under cultivation alone drives many of them into poverty, so that they can hardly live from cocoa cultivation alone. In addition, there are extreme price fluctuations: raw cocoa is traded on the world market in London and New York, where there is always speculation on prices. All too often the producers have to sell their cocoa below value.

West Africa, the heart of the chocolate industry

Most of the world’s cocoa – over 60 percent – comes from West Africa, especially from Ghana and the Ivory Coast. In both countries, exploitative child labor is a major problem. Experts from the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago (NORC) estimate that there are over two million children involved in cocoa cultivation. Child labor is more widespread today than it was ten years ago.

The chocolate industry has been promising for years that it will fight child exploitation. After all, who wants to enjoy chocolate for which children are sent to the fields instead of to school?

Cacao cultivation: hard work that hardly pays off

One of the main causes of exploitative child labor is the far too low income. Cocoa producers in Ivory Coast earn just 67 cents on average per capita and per day. This is the result of a study by Fairtrade International. The study not only calculates what farmers actually earn, but also what they would have to get in order to receive a living income. In other words, an income that covers the cost of food, water, housing, education, health, transport, clothing and other essential needs – including saving for emergencies. For this, the workers would have to receive at least 2.13 euros per capita and per day.

Even Fairtrade-certified cocoa farmers still get too little. In order to benefit from fair trade, cooperatives usually have to sell at least 30 to 40 percent of their goods under fair trade conditions. Although the market for fair trade cocoa has developed enormously in recent years, demand should increase significantly. Fairtrade cocoa currently has a market share of 17 percent.

You think that’s not enough? Then join us and stand up for fair cocoa.

Take part and win until December 6th

Together with Fairtrade you can support the people who pick the cocoa beans for your chocolate. In an online competition, Fairtrade is looking for the best protest slogans for fair cocoa enjoyment. With just a few clicks and a little creativity, you can become an online activist for sustainable cocoa yourself. It’s that easy:

Get creative and design your message for more fairness in the cocoa sector alone, with your friends, acquaintances, at school, in a club or at university.
Share your creative protest slogan via social media.
Activate your environment and collect votes for your slogan. The slogan with the most votes wins.

The internationally renowned street artist Boogie interprets the ten best slogans on a protest wall, the Wall of Fair. With this we will make your protest against unfair cocoa trade on December 10th, the day of human rights, heard in the Berlin government district. Boogie even pays a personal visit to the most creative slogan author and creates an individual work of art live on site.

Second and third place winners can also look forward to smaller boogie artworks of their own protest slogan. Fairtrade surprise boxes packed with fair chocolate products are raffled off for places four to ten.

Dah Oha – cocoa farmer, mother and power woman

Stories like that of the cocoa farmer Dah Oho Gboklela from Gogoko, a small village about 50 kilometers from the Ivorian coast, show the difference that fair trade can make for producers: Due to the early death of his father, Dah Oho has to take responsibility early on. Because the debt money is too expensive, she begins an apprenticeship as a hairdresser before taking over the family’s small cocoa field together with her brother. When she marries, she is granted her own piece of land – not a matter of course in the Ivory Coast, where only 20 percent of landowners are women. She joins the fair trade cooperative ECAKOOG, gets more money for her cocoa and gets tips on how to fertilize properly. This increases earnings and thus earnings. With the help of the Fairtrade premium money, the cooperative also supports its members financially in financing school fees.

For every tonne of cocoa that Dah Oho sells under fair trade conditions, she receives a fixed minimum price, which must not be undercut. Not even if market prices collapse. The minimum prices cover the costs of sustainable production and enable necessary investments in new plants, crop protection or equipment. However, the money is not enough to secure the existence of the family. Like many cocoa producers, Dah Oho can only sell part of their harvest on fair terms. The remaining cocoa is traded on the exchange at the prices specified there. A business that is hardly worthwhile, as the mother of four children explains. She wishes for a better future for her children away from the cocoa trade. They should go to school, become civil servants and later not have to go to the fields – at least not when prices are so low.

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