For-profit investment candidates include firms that employ troubled youth and fair trade vendors, which are commodity producers that profess to pay good wages in the developing world (for example, to cattle ranchers and coffee growers).
This allows most of the small producers around the world – in Central America, South America, the Caribbean, Madagascar and Indonesia – to work directly with cacao growers, paying well above the commodities and "Fair Trade" market prices.
This is remarkable -- fair trade, a similar concept for commodities and handicrafts, is tiny by comparison (my latest estimate is $5 billion).
Only recently had the fair trade concept begun expanding into other commodities, and the only fair trade supplier of the raw materials we required was the olive oil producer Canaan Fair Trade in Palestine.
The new diversity of buyers gives farmers a chance to maximise revenue by selling their coffee through many channels simultaneously: their best through internet auctions, a specialty grade through Fair Trade or other co-operatives, a commodity grade to big exporters and the rest to local markets.
Theoretically, a fair trade farmer never loses, because when the commodity market price is higher than the fair trade price, the farmer receives the market price, and the co-op still receives the premium.
Howard Schultz reinvented the North American coffee break and brought many fair trade practices to a brutally cost-competitive commodity industry, but he hasn't reshaped our societal landscape.
In the same way that the members up and down the supply chain involved in other global commodities, most famously coffee, have embraced fair trade, many stakeholders in the shea business hope to do the same.
IMO had realized the need for a fair trade certification system that avoided FLO's burdensome global price-setting mechanism commodity by commodity.
