Fairtrade vs Direct Trade: What Actually Guarantees Farmers Get Paid Fairly?

Short answer: no scheme, Fairtrade or otherwise, actually guarantees a farmer got treated fairly. Fairtrade guarantees a minimum price floor that only kicks in when the open market crashes below it. Direct trade, in its strict sense, means a roaster buys straight from a farm with no importer in the chain. Camino Coffee isn't Fairtrade-certified, and we don't check every box of strict direct trade either, we buy through farmer associations and importers like most specialty roasters our size. What we do control is who we buy through. Here's exactly what that means, and what it doesn't.

What Fairtrade Certification Actually Guarantees

Fairtrade guarantees a price floor, not a fair price in any absolute sense. When the commodity market for coffee drops below a set threshold, certified producers get paid that floor instead of the crashed price. Since August 2023, the Fairtrade Minimum Price for washed arabica has been $1.80 per pound, plus a fixed $0.20 per pound Fairtrade Premium on top (Fairtrade International). That's the whole mechanism. It's a safety net, not a raise.

The Price Floor Only Matters in a Crash

Here's the part that surprises most buyers. The floor only activates when market price drops below it. During specialty-grade demand spikes, when market prices already sit well above the minimum, the floor does nothing at all. That's not really a flaw, it's the design. A floor catches a fall. It doesn't lift a ceiling. Worth knowing before you assume the label automatically means "paid above market."

What Certification Costs the Farm

Getting and keeping certification isn't free for a cooperative. There are application and renewal fees, plus the cost of proving compliance through third-party audits, and that overhead comes out of the same margin the certification is supposed to protect. Peer-reviewed research comparing certified coffee cooperatives in Ethiopia, India, and Nicaragua found the income effect is highly context-specific: real gains in some countries, none in others, even when the certified price and yields improved (Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, 2021).

Where the Floor Stops Mattering Entirely

A lot of Fairtrade-certified coffee never actually sells under Fairtrade terms at all. Global supply of certified coffee has outpaced demand for it as a certified product, so farms do the work and pay the fees to get certified, and then a large share of that coffee still gets sold at ordinary commodity price because there isn't enough buyer demand specifically for the certified lot. Fairtrade International's own 2011 monitoring data, cited in a 2012 policy analysis, found about a third of certified producer organizations sold less than 25% of their total output on actual Fairtrade terms (Elliott, Center for Global Development). The label existed. The floor never triggered for most of the harvest. The farm paid for certification it couldn't fully cash in.

None of this makes Fairtrade a bad idea. It's a specific tool, built for commodity-scale supply chains, where a price floor protects large numbers of smallholders from catastrophic market crashes across chains too big for individual relationships. That's a genuinely useful function at scale. It's just a different question from "did this specific farmer get paid well for this specific harvest." If you want to understand what actually separates commodity-grade coffee from the graded, scored beans we sell, our guide on what is specialty coffee breaks down where that line sits.

What Direct Trade Means, and Why We Don't Claim It

Direct trade, in its strict sense, means a roaster buys straight from a farm or cooperative, no importer in the chain, price negotiated in person. That's not exactly how Camino buys, so we're not going to slap the label on ourselves just because it sounds better than certified. We buy through farmer associations and importers, same as most specialty roasters our size. That doesn't mean arm's length, though. We stay in touch with the farms directly and visit them ourselves sometimes, just not as a standing routine every single harvest. What we control is who we buy through: we choose partners who treat their farmers fairly, and we walk away from ones that don't. It's not the strict definition of direct trade. It's closer to relationship-based sourcing, and we'd rather call it that honestly than borrow a term we don't fully earn.

Named Farms, Not Anonymous Lots

Commodity coffee gets pooled before it ever reaches a roaster, dozens of farms blended into one lot graded by bean size and defect count, not flavor. Direct trade skips that pooling entirely. Every single-origin we carry traces back to one grower, one harvest, one relationship we stand behind. That traceability isn't decoration, it's the mechanism that lets a farm capture more of the final price instead of losing it to a chain of unnamed intermediaries. You can see how we score and select these lots in our piece on how coffee cupping scores help you choose the best bean, it's the same grading discipline behind what we're willing to pay for.

Partners Who Treat Farmers Fairly, Not Just a Cheaper Price

We don't have a spreadsheet with the exact price every farm got paid, and we're not going to pretend otherwise. What we do is choose who we buy through carefully. Other European direct-trade roasters describe a similar standard: Dutch direct-trade coffee company Wakuli says its model is built to pay farmers more than they earned under their previous buying arrangement (Wakuli). Same idea here. We work with farmer associations and importers who treat their farmers fairly, and specialty-grade lots like ours already sell for well above commodity price on that basis alone, before we even get to the fairness question. If a partner's reputation or practices don't hold up, we stop buying from them. It's not a secret we're protecting, it's just not a single number we can hand you, because it depends on the harvest, the association, and the relationship, not a fixed figure printed on a label. You can read our full sourcing approach on the About Us page.

Fairtrade vs Direct Trade: Which One Actually Pays Farmers More?

Direct trade, done honestly, tends to pay above any certification floor, because the price gets checked and adjusted per harvest instead of pegged to a fixed minimum. But that comparison only holds at small scale. A roaster buying a handful of farms' worth of coffee a year can stay close to the actual number, ask the association or importer what changed, and push back if a harvest's price doesn't add up. A retailer buying container-loads from hundreds of cooperatives across a continent cannot do that at the same relational depth, which is exactly why a floor-based model exists for them instead.

Different Tools for Different Scales

Neither system is "better" as an abstract idea. Fairtrade solves a volume problem, protecting large numbers of smallholders from market crashes across supply chains too big for individual relationships. Direct trade solves a different problem, letting a small roaster pick partners it trusts to treat farmers fairly, instead of buying an anonymous blend with no relationship behind it. Direct trade only scales down to Camino's size. Fairtrade only scales up past it. Neither one is built to do the other's job, and that's fine.

That's also why we don't chase certification. It wouldn't add anything we don't already do, and the audit fee would come out of a farm's margin for no added benefit at our volume.

Why Doesn't Camino Get Fairtrade Certified?

Because certification protects a floor we already pay well above, and the audit fee would eat into a farmer's margin for a guarantee they don't need. We looked at it early on. The math didn't work in the farmer's favor, so we kept sourcing the way we already do. That's the whole answer, no asterisk. If our prices ever dropped toward commodity level, a floor mechanism might be worth revisiting. They haven't. So it doesn't come up.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is direct trade coffee always more ethical than Fairtrade coffee?

Not automatically. Unlike Fairtrade, there's no independent body auditing what any given roaster means by "direct trade," so it depends entirely on that roaster's transparency. That's why we publish farm names and talk openly about how the price gets set, instead of leaving it at a label.

Does Fairtrade certification guarantee a living income for the farmer?

No, and Fairtrade International itself treats them as two separate tools. The Minimum Price is a safety net against price crashes. A Living Income Reference Price is a different calculation entirely, an estimate of what a farmer would need to earn a livable income, and it's tracked separately because the two don't automatically move together. ("Living wage," a related but distinct term, applies to hired workers on Fairtrade plantations, not smallholder farmers like the ones we source from.)

Does Camino buy directly from the farms, or through an importer?

Through farmer associations and importers, same as most specialty roasters our size. But that's not the whole picture, we stay in direct contact with the farms and visit them ourselves sometimes, just not on a fixed schedule every harvest. What we don't skip is who we choose to buy through: only partners who treat their farmers fairly. Full sourcing detail is on our About Us page.

Does Camino know the exact price every farmer was paid?

No, and we won't pretend to. What we do have is a direct relationship with the farms and a deliberate choice of who we buy through, partners with a track record of treating farmers fairly, not an anonymous supplier we've never talked to. It's a relationship-based check, not a paperwork audit.

The Bottom Line

No scheme, certified or not, actually guarantees a farmer got treated fairly. Fairtrade protects a floor. Direct trade, done right, pays above it. Both are structures. Neither one does the work on its own, the work is choosing to treat farmers fairly and following through on that, whatever label ends up on the bag or doesn't. That's the part we can't outsource to a certification, and neither can anyone else. Curious what that looks like in the cup? See what's roasting.