Fairtrade coffee

Coffee is one of the worlds most exported article and coffee is a very important article to export for poor countries. Sweden is the land in the world, which consume the most coffee and each person drinks almost on average 9 kg a year. Unfortunately most coffee, which is delivered to Sweden is not Fairtrade and the coffee is usually delivered from the other side of the world. Consequences are the long transports and a bad environment.

Coffees is mostly grown in small farms in the poor countries. The farms are mostly located far away from town.

The workers on the farms, are often families together with their relatives. The employees work under bad conditions with long workdays and they don't earn so much money. Even child labour may exist in the coffee farms. Fairtrade coffee is an evidence of that those working conditions don't exist. The organisation Fairtrade gives Fairtrade farms contribution so that they can for example build schools and develop the community. That makes it possible for the community to get better economy and a better social development. The employees at Fairtrade coffee farms also have to use clothes for protection and they are also assured that it doesn't exist any discrimination.

An employer at a coffee farm

Today you can buy fair trade coffee at almost every supermarket in Sweden and almost every coffee company produce fair trade coffee. Even many cafés have started to serve fair trade coffee and it looks like the range of fair trade coffee has grown a lot.

We have made an survey about how many people who purchase Fairtrade coffee. It shows that, it was only 23% of all of them who answered the questionnaire, who purchased the Fairtrade coffee. 77% don´t purchase the Fairtrade coffee and the biggest reason seems to be according to, the people answering questionnaire, that people are lazy and don't care about Fairtrade and because it's much more expensive. An other reason is that people don't like the taste of Fairtrade coffee as they do with the “ordinary” coffee. But many of the people we asked about the Fairtrade coffee say, that they have no idea about why they don't purchase Fairtrade coffee.

We have tasted Fairtrde coffee and we didn't feel any difference between it and the ordinary coffee. The price for Fairtrade coffee is almost 10 SEK more expensive than ordinary coffee so it's not so hard to understand that people don't buy Fairtrade coffee.
How can the price differ so much and who do really get the money?
Is it the farmers or the people who organize things?
These questions are difficult to get an answer to if we don't visit the farmers.

We also examined about it people know what the Fairtrade logotype mean. Less than 50% of the people we asked didn't know what the Fairtrade logotype means and it's a big reason to why it is so few who purchase the Fairtrade coffee.