woman wearing a basket on her head picking tea leaves in a field

UTM to be designated a fair trade campus

Blake Eligh

By next year, your morning cup of coffee or mid-afternoon chocolate may break do more than boost your mood—it may also be helping a stranger half a world away. U of T Mississauga’s Hospitality & Retail Services department is taking steps to make UTM a fair trade-designated campus in a process that should be completed some time in 2016.

As part of the process to achieve this designation, UTM’s food services hosted several activities around campus this week to raise awareness of the new initiative. The week kicked off with a lunchtime talk by Sean McHugh, executive director of The Canadian Fair Trade Network. Over a meal made from fair trade and local foods, including Canadian salmon, local corn, a chocolate brownie and coffee and teas, McHugh described the impact fair trade can have for small-production farmers who are cut out of world distribution markets by large-scale corporations.

Helping producers get fair payment for goods helps the farmers and artisans to earn a living wage, promotes environmentally sustainable pricing and empowers producers who are usually too small to compete with world-wide corporations, McHugh says.

Nearly five-million cups of coffee are consumed every day on campuses across Canada, McHugh says. “If Canadian campuses commited to serving fair trade coffee, there’s tremendous potential to have an enourmous impact,” he says.

woman wearing a banana costume and sitting on a table
This week’s fair trade awareness program also included staffers dressed as bananas who toured the campus, handing out buttons and educating people about the importance and impacts of fair trade. There were tea tastings, one-dollar coffee sales, and fair trade brownies for sale to raise funds for the upcoming Global Experience Guatemala trip to visit fair trade coffee farms in South America.

The impetus to join came from a presentation McHugh gave at a conference last year. Hospitality & Retail Services director, Vicky Jezierski, was impressed by what Fair Trade Canada was doing and thought there was potential for UTM to become designated as a Fair Trade Campus. “The requirement that the campus become Fair Trade-designated was included in the recent request for proposal for potential campus food suppliers,” says Andrea De Vito, assistant director, hospitality and retail services.

“We have been hearing from students who want to see more local, sustainable options on campus,” De Vito says, adding that while food supplier Chartwell’s buys from local suppliers, fair trade-certified products will help supply regularly consumed items that cannot be produced locally. “Fair Trade certification ensures that the products are of good quality, purchased at a fair price, are produced sustainably, and are often certified organic, as well.” 

Currently, campus food services offers fair trade teas and coffees at the North Side Bistro in Deerfield Hall. To meet the designation requirements, UTM would supply fair trade-certified coffee, tea and chocolate at all non-branded food outlets across campus. (Starbucks currently offers fair trade espresso.)

“UTM will see fair trade certified coffee and tea in the North Side Bistro, at Colman Commons, in the TFC, and everywhere chocolate bars are sold, including vending machines,” De Vito says.  Fair trade coffee and tea will be served at catered campus events, too.

De Vito says the campus could expand its offerings in the future as more products become fair trade certified.

Participating in fair trade practices ensures that suppliers receive fair market prices for their products and reduces the number of steps in the supply chain to ensure a larger portion of those profits go directly to the suppliers. “By reducing the number of hands in the pot, the supplier gets a higher proportion of the end price. To stay competitive, that end price needs to be in line with other similar products that may not be fair trade certified,” De Vito says, adding that food prices at UTM should remain unaffected by the new designation.

This week’s fair trade information sessions are just one step in the designation process. Next steps include establishing a Fair Trade Campus Steering Committee to advise about next steps, including the possibility of providing fair trade goods at The Blind Duck, working with UTMSU and encouraging availability of fair trade coffees and teas at branded food outlets on campus.