"Fair Trade isn't a viable solution," said Gordon Gillet, Nestl?'s senior vice president for purchasing and exports. "First, it favors the few and, secondly, it provides an incentive to farmers to increase coffee production at a time when they should perhaps be seriously considering alternative crops."
Anneke Theunissen, a spokeswoman for Fairtrade Labelling Organizations International, the group that oversees Fair Trade certification, disagreed. "At this moment, Fair Trade labeling is the only way for the disadvantaged small farmers to survive in the market," she said.
As for the Berkeley initiative, the industry has largely dismissed it as a quirky extreme, saying customers should decide what coffee they want.
"Berkeley has always distinguished itself, to put it politely, by a surprising originality," said Francois-Xavier Perroud, a Nestl? spokesman.
Berkeley, though, may be a natural place for the coffee controversy to percolate. The city is known as a coffee Mecca where couples go to coffee houses on dates rather than to bars, and where drinkers debate the merits of one roast over another the way the French debate the merits of wines. Peet's Coffee & Tea, a famous Berkeley roaster, was the training ground for the founders of Starbucks, the biggest and most successful coffee bar chain in the world. Both were early sellers of Fair Trade beans, along with other coffees.
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