Over 25 million people earn their livelihood growing coffee, and fair traders were among the first to show that the wealth from the world's second most traded commodity was not being shared with producers. The global coffee market is shaped like an hourglass - five corporations regulate coffee transactions between the millions of coffee farmers and billions of coffee drinkers. In 1962, coffee producing countries signed the first International Coffee Agreement (ICA) in order to buffer price fluctuations, but it fell apart 27 years later, leading to the "coffee crisis" of 2001-2002, which reduced prices to a 30 year low.

Enter the fair trade response to the "coffee crisis" - an effort to drive fair trade sales by "mainstreaming" the product in conventional stores. Many fair trade advocates were uncomfortable about the mainstreaming of fair trade products by multinational corporations - the very market structures that provoked the "coffee crisis" in the first place. Some argue that large corporations use fair trade as a PR moment. Are corporations embedding such practices of fairness into their corporate culture, or is it mere tokenism?

The FoodFirst study attached below argues that fair trade success can be attributed not only to certification and sales, but to sustainable local development and social capital developed in farming communities. The study suggests alternatives to "mainstreamed" corporate fair-trade, such as the Fair trade Direct market model in which farmers grow, process, roast, package and distribute coffee - feeding into the local economy and allowing farmers autonomy over the value added process. Looking forward to building "market sovereignty," the report suggests that farmers need to be shareholders in the business of fairtrade and in this dynamic lies the consumer, in solidarity with farmers in the movement for social change.

As a contribution to food policy, the FoodFirst paper makes us ask ourselves: Can markets become engines for social change, or do social movements need to organize to change markets?-AP*