Once a year, Samuel Mugi and his fellow tea farmers in the district of Muranga, in Kenya’s central highlands, would visit nearby tea factories to see what they could learn. One such tour, in late 2012, completely transformed their approach to farming.
Samuel and his colleagues from the Gatunguru tea factory noticed, visiting the Gacharage tea factory, that it was very different from their own.
“The first thing was hygiene. Everything was impeccably done, the workers wore clean clothes and the factory was very clean. You could also see the workers were in high spirits and as we learned more – including the fact it was more than a tea factory and had become a collective family with farmers and workers engaging in numerous activities away from work – we were intrigued and wanted to be like them.”
Mugi and his colleagues had not heard of Fairtrade, a social movement that seeks to offer farmers and workers better prices and decent working conditions as long as they meet a set of minimum labour and environmental standards.
They quickly put themselves on the road to get Fairtrade certification, attracted by the extra payment of up to $0.60 (£0.43) a kilo that Fairtrade tea draws.
Mugi and a number of colleagues were among more than 450 Fairtrade farmers and delegates from about 50 countries who gathered in Nairobi last week for a convention to discuss the Fairtrade system, which now includes about 1.5 million farmers and workers from across Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean.
Global Fairtrade sales reached €5.9bn (£4.65bn) in 2014, a 10% increase on 2013 driven in part by steady growth in mature Fairtrade markets, including Sweden and Germany, which grew by 37% and 27% respectively.
However, according to estimates published on Monday by the Fairtrade Foundation, the overall retail value of the UK Fairtrade market, the world’s biggest market, fell to about £1.6bn in 2015, from £1.7bn in 2014, largely due to a decline in the price of sugar. Sales of Fairtrade fruit and nuts, and cotton, also fell.
The foundation says that many of the farmers who work to produce the world’s breakfast staples are increasingly struggling to feed their own families because of market forces and two years of erratic rains and drought, which are being compounded by the powerful El Niño events.
The organisation says that in the main tea-producing regions, more than 30% of children are malnourished, which results in stunted physical and mental development. In Malawi, that figure rises to 50%. In Ivory Coast, 65% of cocoa farmers lack sufficient resources for food during the months of July and August, with 80% living on less than 40p a day per person. Farmers in some Central American countries, meanwhile, have no guarantee of food security for up to four months a year.
“It’s a tragic irony that so many of the people we rely on three times a day, from breakfast to dinner, should be going hungry themselves in the 21st century,” said Michael Gidney, CEO of the Fairtrade Foundation. “The current system is broken and farmers are paying the true cost on our behalf.”
In Nairobi, Ann Siminta, compliance manager at the flower company Sher Ethiopia, said the rigorous requirements for certification put off many producers, but the benefits of working under the Fairtrade banner ultimately proved the investment worthwhile.
The 10% premium that Sher Ethiopia gains from certification is managed by its 15,000 workers, who are able to run and equip a school with 4,500 students from kindergarten to high school and a fully fledged hospital. The workers also benefit from training courses, including IT and accounting.
“It’s quite an expensive process,” she says. “For example, to comply with environmental standards we had to create a whole new wetlands system, which means we reuse our used water rather than letting it run into rivers and lakes like most other farms do. The challenge, though, has been seeking to get authorities in government to appreciate the investment that goes into getting certification, which ultimately benefits everybody.”
Another key challenge farmers mentioned was the failure to find adequate markets after investing heavily to comply with set standards.
Humphrey Ayisi, who heads a cocoa farmers’ collective in a district in the east of Ghana, said Fairtrade certification had come with many benefits, including the improved knowledge of production methods they had gained while working as a group.
The cocoa cooperative had started with 15 farmers and now counts 800 among its members. However, he said they collectively produced 2,000 tons in 2015 but only managed to sell half of it, which was a source of frustration for farmers.
He pressed officials of the Fairtrade movement to do more to help farmers, saying the extra cost required to earn certification meant that failure to sell all their produce was especially costly.
Other farmers spoke of dramatically changing weather patterns as the biggest challenge they were facing.
Charbel el Fakhri has been leading an effort over more than a decade and half to persuade farmers to abandon cannabis cultivation in the northern Bekaa valley, Lebanon, and embrace growing grapes.
The initiative, which began with four farmers in 1999, has expanded to cover 250 hectares (617.5 acres) and more than 200 farmers. The high prices offered by buyers attracted to the 100% organic vineyards where no pesticides are used has encouraged many to abandon their illegal cannabis plantations to grow grapes.
But changing weather patterns have meant they sometimes struggle to cope with demand when there is a poor harvest.
“There was one period last year when the weather went from -4C to 25C in one week, ruining our crop, but we are still optimistic and the benefits of our investment, including the high price our grapes fetch, have become obvious to farmers.”
A spokeswoman from the Fairtrade Foundation said the key challenge was convincing more people to appreciate the benefits farmers and workers draw from certification and to continue expanding markets.
“Whatever the Fairtrade sales, retail and catering, we hope [these figures] will show the Fairtrade volume sales steady or in growth so that Fairtrade in the UK continues to bring the significant benefits it does to hard-working families and communities in some of the poorest countries in the world,” she said.
Farmers like Francis Ossey Atse, from Ivory Coast, have no doubt about the benefits of being Fairtrade certified.
“Our children don’t have to work in our plantations because that is banned in the Fairtrade system, and we can also afford to educate them with the income we are drawing. They will have more options in life than their parents did.”