Abstract
Recently, the global coffee market has fallen into a profound crisis. Prices paid to coffee producers in real dollar terms, have fallen to a hundred year low. Many families have been forced to abandon traditional farming. There is consequently an important wave of unemployment in the farming sector which is creating more candidates for emigration to the ‘Norte'.
Meanwhile, a growing percentage of small-scale coffee farmers have found a solution to the crisis. They have become Fair trade certified coffee producers, meaning that they have agreed to follow a set of social and environmental standards in the production of their coffee. For these efforts they receive a guaranteed price for their coffee which is higher than that for conventionally produced coffee. Fair trade has enabled these farmers to survive the crisis and think about the future while their neighbours out of this system have a future that will probably involve crossing the Sonora desert.
The interest in analyzing the current situation is to determine the possibilities that fair trade offer to resolve the crisis, and to see if it can work in the long run to save families who produce it, from hunger and exploitation. We do not really know its full potential as the market for fair trade products appeared only a few years ago. After Europe, North America is the new centre of the phenomena. But is it really due to a profound civic sense of consumers, or is it only a fashionable phenomenon?
This essay will try to give a response to these questions. First, we will analyse more deeply the current situation for the majority of small scale producers in Latin America by looking at the crisis and its consequences on an already weak system. Then, we will underline how Fair trade can benefit those traditionally forgotten populations of the world by empowering them. Finally we will present the weaknesses of Fair trade and how they can be overcome.
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