The nickel is coming. Thank you.

On June 1, 2008, the official Fair Trade minimum price for coffee goes up five cents.

Didn’t it go up last year? Why, yes it did. In 2007, FLO (the Fair Trade standards body) raised prices 5-10 cents. But Equal Exchange and many of our 100% Fair Trade colleagues felt that wasn’t enough. We could have argued for more (and we did) but we could also simply show the way. So we raised our prices by 10 -15 cents, as did Just Coffee, Co-op Coffee and a handful of other Fair Trade veterans.

Well, FLO’s coming around. As Green L.A. Girl says in a great article on the issues:

As you can see, now the FLO minimums and the minimums set by the super-fair trade companies are more or less converging. It seems, by and large, that the super-fair trade companies have succeeded in pushing FLO in their direction.

It’s your support, dear investor, that allows us to take a lead. It gives us margin to do what’s right.

And what is a nickel per pound? Well, for a typical small farming family that’s perhaps $100 – which translates as a visit to the hospital for a family member, an education for a child or a part investment in a sugar cane mill.

For the 66 million pounds of Fair Trade coffee imported in the U.S. in 2007, that would mean another $3 million into the pockets of small farming families. A good return on investment.