FAIRTRADE Coffee...
Coffee, like tea and chocolate, is a drink that is globally commonplace today, fuelling all manner of social situations, relationships and interactions from business meetings and office coffee breaks to café cultures and home comforts.
Coffee, tea and chocolate drinks are derived from plants that are native to tropical and semi-tropical climates, and now grow widely through Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean as a result of the kinds of colonial movements of plant resources. The mainstream global markets in these crops are characterised by three features: -
First, production takes place primarily on plantations, typically involving a concentration of large areas of land in the hands of relatively few owners employing a large number of low-paid labourers who are often dependent on their employer for housing too.
Second, plantations replace the mixed ecologies of the land area they cover with a single commercial crop, a so-called 'monoculture', which is dependent on intensive chemical treatments to sustain fertility and control disease.
Third, the price of these primary agricultural commodities is unprotected on world markets because they are generally produced in countries of the South, where protection and subsidies are rare. This means that these commodities can experience dramatic price fluctuations, both as a repercussion of major climatic or disease events and as a consequence of other activities in the primary coffee market or other corporate players involved in speculating on commodity price movements in the financial futures markets. Some sense of the scale of coffee consumption, the size of the coffee market and the share taken by FAIRTRADE coffee can be gained from the following summary: -
- 31 billion cups of coffee are drunk in the UK every year.
- In 2000 the UK imported 3.1 million bags of coffee worth US$423.3m.
- Comparable figures for 1995 show the dramatic fall in coffee prices:
- 2.8 million bags were imported then worth $671.9m (1 bag = 60kg).
- Between 1993 and 2000 the volume of the UK coffee market declined
by 1.6% while the value of retail sales leapt 22% from £652m to £798m.
- In 2000 coffee surpassed tea, with more than 51% of the market value.
- Instant coffee accounted for 76% of market volume and 87% of the
market value, with roast and ground accounting for the remainder.
- Among the manufacturers, Nestlé and Kraft Jacobs dominate the
instant coffee market, taking 50% and 21% respectively
- Supermarkets' own label brands come a close third.
- The UK coffee shop market grew by 55% between 1997 and 2000
- Sales of FAIRTRADE roast and ground coffee grew by 27% in 2001 with
an estimated retail value of £10.5m, and accounting for 10.5% of the
total volume of the roast and ground market.
- FAIRTRADE coffee took a 3% share of the total coffee market in 2001
(soluble and ground coffee).
- Twenty-five companies market FAIRTRADE coffee
- It is available in most supermarkets as well as in Franchised Coffee outlets. |  |
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