With midterms just around the corner, students are probably drinking more coffee than usual. With this increased caffeine consumption, they just might notice the new coffee options on campus: On Sept. 20, Dining Services began making fair trade coffee available in both Dewick and Carmichael. The coffee is part of Dining Services' new program FEAST (Food Education and Action for Sustainability at Tufts), formerly TFAP (Tufts Food Awareness Project).
"We've had Fair Trade options on campus probably for the last five years," Dining Services Nutrition Marketing Specialist Julie Lampie said. Lampie cited Brown and Brew, the Commons, Hotung and the Tower as on-campus eateries offering fair trade coffee. The Tower Café, she said, sells exclusively Fair Trade, but the fair trade products in the dining halls are new.
"We had our fair trade breakfast last Wednesday to kick off the fair trade option in the dining halls," Lampie said.
According to the Fair Trade Federation Web site, food production companies whose products bear the fair trade label must meet strict criteria, including paying workers a "fair wage in local context," providing a "healthy and safe" work environment, being "open to public accountability," and "providing financial and technical assistance to producers whenever possible."
Lampie explained that while Dining Services hopes one day to offer exclusively fair trade coffee in the dining halls and around campus, to do so now would be "too easy" for students. "Just to have it available exclusively doesn't educate anybody," she said. "We need students to educate other students."
This year, Tufts' Environmental Consciousness Outreach (ECO) has been filling that role. Juniors Caroline Wick and Alex Bedig have been helping through ECO to spread awareness of Fair Trade coffee.
Wick, a transfer student from Bates College, helped spearhead the campaign. "When I first got to Tufts, I noticed that we didn't have fair trade coffee in the dining hall," Wick said. "I thought it was a great way to make a difference."
Lampie explained that Dining Services won't make students pay the difference for the more expensive fair trade coffee, either in the dining halls or in on-campus eateries such as the Tower Caf?© and Brown and Brew. "Fair trade coffee ... is 20 to 30 percent more [expensive], and we have not passed that cost along to students," Lampie said.
Hopefully, Lampie explained, having fair trade at the same price as regular coffee will increase student consumption. "If [students] show us through their cup usage" that they are drinking the fair trade coffee, Lampie said, "eventually we will go all fair trade ... I'm optimistic that students will support it."
Bedig explained that ECO will be using some new methods this year to get the word out on fair trade coffee. ECO will employ "all the usual tactics: flyering around campus, table tents, getting clear labels on the food in the dining halls that is fair trade ... maybe a few Facebook groups or events, as well as some innovative ones," Bedig said.
While some of the innovative events are still being planned, "We will be having an acoustic, candle lit ... concert where we plan to use the forum to spread publicity about our issue," Bedig said. ECO hopes that the concert will employ no electricity whatsoever, and, pending the approval of the Tufts University Police Department (TUPD), be held on the residential quad.
"It might be tricky to get [TUPD] to let us turn off the street lamps and all the lights facing the quad in the dorms, and then let us put out several hundred candles," Bedig said. "But you never know. They have no reason not to trust us; we cleaned up our windmills after last year's stunt on the president's lawn."
Bedig explained that the fair trade movement has more goals than just coffee. "Coffee is definitely only the beginning," he said. "Totally fair trade coffee on campus is considered a short-term goal, something that should happen before current freshmen graduate."
The next goal is fair trade bananas, which ECO is also helping to promote. "Banana farmers are coming to speak at Tufts in October, and they're fair trade as well," Wick said.
Lampie explained that bananas may take a little longer than coffee to implement. "The challenge right now is [that] fair trade organic bananas are available in the marketplace, but going with the organic option as well as fair trade is prohibitively expensive," she said.
As a result, Dining Services is aiming to have fair trade non-organic bananas in the dining halls sometime soon. "For the interim, that's the product we can afford in the short term to provide," Lampie said. "I'm hoping well before the end of the year ... that we will have that fair trade banana in place in both Dewick and Carmichael."
Though fair trade is mostly a social issue - not an environmental one - Bedig explained that there are some environmental benefits to using fair trade products, especially coffee, which Bedig cited as "the second-most traded commodity in the world, behind oil.
"Since most fair trade farms are more accountable for the goods they produce, they are less likely to use damaging fertilizers or exploit their resources than non-fair trade," Bedig said. Products with the fair trade label are required to engage in "environmentally sustainable practices," according to the Fair Trade Federation Web site.
Still, the social aspect of fair trade goods is important to many students. "We're not really connected to the producers of most goods that we consume," Wick said. "Fair trade coffee tries to make the link between consumers and producers smaller, so more of the money goes to support the farmer. It's a simple, easy way to make a difference."
