Just a few months ago, Starbucks announced a $20 million Small Farmer Sustainability Initiative (SFSI) to grow the amount of “Fair Trade Certified” coffee that they purchase and invest more in the social and economic development of small-scale coffee farmers. The press release announcing the program reads:

The SFSI will allow Starbucks and the Fairtrade organizations to have an even greater impact than before, benefitting both coffee farmers and the coffee industry worldwide. Small-scale farms will have greater access to capacity-building resources in the areas of agronomy, technical support, and capital investment. Offering cooperatives increased access to credit and quality improving resources will enable farmers to increase income, improve family livelihoods, and promote sustainable community development. The partnership directly impacts the social, environmental and economic wellbeing of farmers and will help increase their participation in the global specialty coffee market.

The SFSI provides a new global standard for collaboration in the coffee industry to improve ethical sourcing and responsible business practices. The three-year pilot, launching in September 2009, will leverage on-the-ground expertise and resources each group has available in coffee growing regions. “

Currently, 10% of Starbucks coffee is certified “Fair Trade”, making it the world’s largest purchaser – buying over 40 million pounds a year. The company has been criticized in the past for not investing more in “fair-trade” farmers, but has responded that it upholds what it calls CAFE Practices — a set of standards developed with Conservation International, farmers and other NGOs and verified by SCS. But recently, Starbucks has been forging a closer relationship with the Fairtrade Labeling Organizations — in fact, representatives joined Starbucks CEO George Shultz on his trip to Rwanda this past June.

An article from the UK Guardian shares some very interesting insights gathered while traveling on the trip to Rwanda. The author asks,

Where exactly should the responsibility of a company like Starbucks begin, with its 17,000 stores and its 50m cups of coffee sold every week, and where should it end?

For Fair Trade evangelists, it’s about worker’s rights, wages, and working conditions. But for Starbucks, it’s more — it’s about empowering and lifting small coffee farmers out of poverty. This is a philosophy that has led to a very close relationship between Starbucks, George Shultz, and Rwandan President Paul Kagame. From the Guardian article:

“What we look for is to see that the farmers are getting more out of their crop,” he (Kagami) says. In the recent past farmers have been abandoning coffee because there was no income in it – in real terms coffee farmers are paid far less than they were 30 years ago. He believes that Starbucks, which has opened a $250,000 farmer-support centre in Kigali to share best practice, can help to reverse that trend. He wishes they could do more – “We’d love to see more of the value chain over here,” he says, meaning roasting plants and packaging facilities, “but we don’t want to make too many demands. You have to move at their pace, really.”

Kagame is a soft-spoken and serious man, but he becomes animated when he lays out his vision for his country. “Trade has always been the single most important thing to enable transformation to take place here in Rwanda; it creates entrepreneurship, self-reliance, rather than people always waiting for someone to help them out.” After the genocide, Kagame suggests, trade not aid was really their only hope – “If you have to work with your neighbour, have to sell him something, then it builds a community.” There is, he says, no other way to achieve it.

The growing relationship between Starbucks and Fairtrade organizations is what caught many people’s attention on the Rwanda trip:

In the past few years, the positives for Starbucks have been a little hard to come by. Its ethical standards and anti-union practices were widely debated – particularly in the damning documentary about Ethiopian coffee, Black Gold. After two decades of unprecedented growth, profits also fell last year by more than 50%. The firm announced more than 10,000 job losses and 1,000 store closures. Schultz, who had stepped back from the day-to-day running of the company in the millennium year to spend more time with his family, returned as chief executive in January 2008.

He came back, he says, “principally to try to fix some things. I just felt we had achieved 15 years of astounding success as a public company, and I think success sometimes breeds entitlement. We reached the point where I thought maybe the company was drifting. I didn’t want to come back to point blame; I just wanted to get back to the culture that formed the company.”

It seems that the fair-trade commitment in the UK and the involvement in Rwanda is a key part of that attempt to reaffirm values, join up the various parts of the Starbucks story. Is that why he is here?

“I think it is emblematic of what we are trying to be about. I remember my early conversations with President Kagame, where he was outlining his vision for Rwanda. It took me a while to understand that in fact Starbucks could come here and really make a difference. We do not have the resources to do it all. The line is so long of people who have needs.” Is it, I wonder, in part a kind of penitence? Starbucks became in some minds synonymous with the excesses of multinationals, wedded to growth at all costs …

“I think that association has been blown out of proportion,” Schultz says. “In some way we were labelled as one of the poster children of the prevailing culture, but that was never fair.” Would he like to see all the coffee they sell across the world be Fairtrade? He would, he says, and that is the way they are heading, though there are questions of quality and supply to deal with.

Note: All the above excerpts come from “Starbucks Founder Spreads Gospel of Hope in Rwanda” by Tim Adams.