Lessons Learned: Recommendations for Fair Trade Certified™ Under Climate Change
Quick Summary
- This team collaborated with Fair Trade USA™ to explore how FTUSA’s Agricultural Production Standard (APS) is impacted by the European Union Deforestation Regulation and how farmers can quantify and profit from carbon storage.
This article is the third in a series of six that highlight the Policy Clinic projects completed by EPM masters students in collaboration with our partners. We'd like to give a special thanks to Jenifer Jackson and Alex Thomas from Fair Trade USA for collaborating with us on this project.
Consider this: the coffee you drink in the morning, and the chocolate you eat at night, were both grown by a farmer somewhere in the world. You feel good knowing that the coffee was produced sustainably through the farmer's partnership with Fair Trade USA™. However, growing concerns regarding climate change and deforestation have increased pressure on farmers to mitigate harm to the environment, which begs the question, how? And what role can a nonprofit certifying agency, like Fair Trade USA (FTUSA), play?
We began this capstone as students interested in learning more about how climate change policy affects supply chains. Fair Trade USA is a non-profit certification organization that works with farmers, workers, and fishers from around the world. FTUSA’s model protects human rights, enables sustainable livelihoods for farmers, fishers, and workers, and creates more resiliency – in both communities, as well as supply chains. Our interests aligned perfectly with the organization’s mission and values. An important part of this project to both our client and our team was centering equity; farmers already expend limited resources to comply with existing regulations, therefore our goal was to minimize the additional burden on farmers.
Our team pursued two topic areas (1) how FTUSA’s Agricultural Production Standard (APS) is impacted by the European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR), and (2) potential ways in which farmers can quantify and profit from carbon storage. Both research topics focused on decarbonizing supply chains, which is crucial to reducing greenhouse gas emissions due to the amount of carbon tied to the production and transportation of goods.
In regard to the EUDR, FTUSA needed to better understand how their current policies may or may not address deforestation in a manner consistent with the EUDR as an international trade regulation. For farmers partnering with FTUSA to continue selling EUDR compliant products on the market, FTUSA’s Agricultural Production Standard (APS) and accompanying policies needed to align with the EUDR. We discovered that the APS already incorporates key concepts of the EUDR; however, FTUSA can take additional steps to assist farmers. This includes facilitating data collection from farmers along supply chains to establish accountability under regulations like the EUDR.
An additional economic consideration is the carbon that is stored when farmers do engage in less emission-intensive activities, such as refraining from tilling soil. Such sustainable practices can keep carbon in the ground instead of contributing to global warming in the atmosphere. Companies that are interested in offsetting their emissions, (for one ton of carbon released, they purchase one ton of carbon stored somewhere else) can make storing carbon a profitable enterprise for farmers. Our team investigated what online tools (known as carbon calculators) exist to help farmers track the carbon they are storing, and what organizations can legitimize this stored carbon as a credit, and help farmers sell this credit on a carbon market.
After months of research and collaboration with FTUSA staff members Jenifer Jackson and Alex Thomas, our team has developed a series of recommendations that detail the potential benefits and challenges of addressing agricultural decarbonization. We considered both the capacity of FTUSA and the farmers to proceed with data collection and analysis and ultimately proposed a partnership with an external organization to assist with these activities. Our team learned there is power in collaboration, especially when addressing climate change. Collaboration can ensure the chocolate and coffee we consume each day empower the farmers at the frontlines of mitigating climate change.