Fair Trade News

by Hilary Johnson, Seward Co-op Assistant Produce Manager and LFTN steering committee member

Rabbi Morris Allen, of Beth Jacob Congregation in Mendota Heights, MN, has been promoting kashrut, Jewish dietary laws, to his congregation for twenty years. He says that kashrut provides “a way in which we as Jews understand a daily opportunity to sanctify our lives, to create a sense of holiness and a sense of awareness of God in our lives.” This consciousness means that Allen takes his food and its production seriously.

More than a year ago, Allen learned of labor abuses at an Iowa kosher meat processing plant that supplied the Twin Cities Jewish community. He was faced with a contradiction: The worker may slaughter an animal according to the laws of kashrut, but he or she may be underpaid and mistreated. What if the ritual is observed, but the ethics are undermined?

Allen distinguishes between “ritual,” the letter of the law that describes specific procedures for kosher slaughter and food handling, and the ethics of how kosher food is actually produced. While he does not privilege one over the other, he thinks current certification practices do. According to Allen, “kashrut has become more and more concerned with whether or not the lung of a cow is smooth, but has forgotten that the hand of the worker is just as important. That’s what heksher tzedek is all about.”

Heksher tzedek, or justice certification, is Allen’s answer to the contradiction of the ritually correct but underpaid worker. Working with a myriad of groups, including local and national committees and nonprofits, as well as a Boston consulting firm, he began creating the heksher tzedek after his trip to Iowa. They are now in the process of defining standards and determining the method of certification. The standards cover six areas: Health & Safety, Wages & Benefits, Training, Environmental Impact, Corporate Transparency, and Product Development. Allen stresses that worker and manager participation has been essential to creating meaningful guidelines within these areas, and that transparency is key to a rigorous certification process. As an example, he describes a hypothetical company that claims to offer health benefits to workers, but upon auditing worker paystubs, certifiers might find no deductions for premiums, indicating that no one is actually signed up for the benefits. Allen gives as one possible reason for this the fact of large numbers of plant workers being migrant workers, many of whom speak or read little English.

Immigrant workers are at the center of the U.S. food system, from production to processing. The heksher tzedek standards, therefore, require that workers receive training in their native languages. As to the larger question of whether a company technically violating the law by employing undocumented workers should receive a heksher tzedek, Allen says that such workers are so prevalent that they virtually form the backbone of U.S. industry. He asserts that legislation like last spring’s Sensenbrenner immigration bill, which would have required deportation of millions of undocumented workers, would bring the kosher meat industry “to a screeching halt overnight.”

The heksher tzedek campaign is not uncontroversial in the Jewish community. Orthodox Jews have traditionally performed kosher certification, and Rabbi Allen's movement is made up in large part of Conservative Jews. Critics question the validity of certification by non-Orthodox Jews, but Allen insists that the heksher tzedek will not be replacing Orthodox kosher certification. He believes it could even bring Jews back to kashrut who have abandoned it because of the common focus on ritual over ethics. He says that the heksher tzedek “is a way to demonstrate our concern for the vertical relationship between ourselves and God and also the horizontal relationship between ourselves and other people.”

Allen believes the heksher tzedek will have appeal to non-Jews as well. He says non-Jews already look for the kosher label for reasons of their own, including concern for food safety. Allen, like many in the fair trade movement, firmly believes that people want to do the right thing, and that they will, when given the choice.

Like fair-trade certified products, items with the heksher tzedek are likely to cost more than those without. Because of the inspection and certification costs, kosher food in general, especially meat, usually costs more than non-kosher food. But Allen points out that being able to buy cheap food often comes with a hidden cost: Exploitation of workers. If the meat costs a little more because the workers who processed it got paid better and received benefits like health care and sick time, he says, “then I would say that’s what it takes in order to demonstrate that keeping kosher really has impact, not only on my own life, and my own relationship to God, but to the society in which I live.”

The Local Fair Trade Network (LFTN) will celebrate the debut of the Local Fair Trade food label with four events events in Minneapolis and Winona, Minnesota, July 22-25. Produce from four local organic farms have been pilot certified to meet or exceed the standards of the Agricultural Justice Project (AJP).

It all starts from 3:00-6:00 PM, Sunday, July 22 when representatives of LFTN and AJP and Keewaydin Farms co-owner Rufus Hauke will be present at Seward Co-op to talk to customers about Local Fair Trade while co-op staff distribute free samples of food from participating farms. Seward Co-op is located at 2111 East Franklin Avenue in Minneapolis.

Next we will head to Bluff Country Co-op from 11:30-1:30 and 4:00-6:00 Monday, July 23 to talk to customers while co-op staff distributes free deli items from participating farms. Shoppers at both co-ops will also have the opportunity to become the “face” of the conscientious consumer in Local Fair Trade marketing materials. Bluff Country Co-op is located at 121 West 2nd Street in downtown Winona.

We will be joined by Bluff Country general manager Liz Heywood and Featherstone Farms owner Jack Hedin at the Blue Heron Coffeehouse, located across the street from Bluff Country Co-op at 162 West 2nd Street, from 6:00-8:00 PM on Tuesday, July 24 for a Local Fair Trade Open House. The public is invited to sample Blue Heron’s delicious specialties featuring Featherstone Farm produce and hear about the movement towards fair trade is American agriculture. The event is free and will feature live local music.

We will wrap up with another Local Fair Trade Open House at the Birchwood Café from 6:00-8:00 PM on Wednesday, July 25. We will be joined by Seward Co-op and Peace Coffee staff, Riverbend Farm owner Greg Reynolds and Brad Conley of Etica Fair Trade Wine. The public is invited to sample the Birchwood’s delicious specialties featuring Riverbend Farms produce, sample Etica Fair Trade wines and Peace Coffee's new blend and hear about the movement towards fair trade in American agriculture. The Birchwood Café is located at 3311 East 25th Street in Minneapolis.

The Local Fair Trade label is an innovative effort to certify social justice in domestic agriculture. Over the last twenty years a system of Fair Trade has been built for imported products like coffee and chocolate. In this system, farmers in the developing world are guaranteed prices for their products that will allow them to stay on their land, educate their children and improve their communities. The Local Fair Trade label pilot project works with two co-op grocery stores and four local farms that practice fairness in their relationships, including sustainable prices for farmers, establishing long-term trading relationships, treating farm workers with dignity and respecting their right to organize. The project aims to create a model that can be replicated regionally and nationally, and can demonstrate that food can be produced in the United States without exploiting farm workers or driving family farms out of business.

The Local Fair Trade Network (LFTN) builds on the foundation created by the organic food, farm worker and cooperative movements, bringing together the growers, sellers and eaters of food to cooperatively build a food system that is just and healthy for everyone. Based in Minneapolis, LFTN focuses its work on the Upper Midwest and aims to be a model for the creation of other regional Fair Trade bodies.

LFTN is partnering in the label pilot with the Agricultural Justice Project (AJP), a non-profit initiative to create fairness and equity in our food system through the development of social justice standards for organic and sustainable agriculture. Project partners Rural Advancement Foundation International—USA, Comité de Apoyo a los Traba-jadores Agrícolas/Farmworker Support Committee, Northeast Organic Farming Association, and Florida Organic Growers/Quality Certification Services are leaders in the fields of sustainable agriculture policy, workers’ rights, community-based food systems, and organic certification.

In the Summer of 2006, the Local Fair Trade Network and the Agricultural Justice Project agreed to join forces in the creation of a Domestic Fair Trade label. Two co-ops and five farms in the Upper Midwest will serve as the subjects of a pilot project that will develop a certification process for the standards developed by AJP, as well as refine those standards. The goal of the pilot project is to have certified Fair Trade products from those farms in co-ops during the growing season of 2007. LFTN and AJP are seeking input on the standards, how the label should be marketed, as well as the governance of the Domestic Fair Trade system.