Brooklyn coffee drinkers play "fair"- Vox Pop cafe in Ditmas park serves conscious brew

Vox Pop, latin shorthand for "voice of the people",  is located in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn at 1022 Courtelyou Road. It takes pride in serving up coffee with the "fair trade" label, which generally means the workers and farmers are paid fairly. Far less familiar to us than organic, cruelty-free, or sweatshop-free, it has spread from the West coast, where well financed activist groups have been promoting  its popularity. "Fair-trade" coffee is becoming more popular amoung specialty coffees in the U.S..

It is not widely available, but Gorilla coffee in Park Slope carries it. All of their coffee is organic and Fair trade certified. 

I called Tillie's of Brooklyn, a coffee shop located on the corner of Vanderbilt and Dekalb in Clinton Hill. They don't officially carry any Fair Trade Certified coffee, but they do note that the definition isn't quite what it seems.

After doing some research, TransFair USA , a non-profit group in Oakland California that awards the Fair Trade certified label to farm products, has conceded to a NY Times reporter that labor abuses like paying workers below a country's minimum wage does exist at some of their certified farms.  

Jean Walsh, a spokeswoman for TransFair, conceded that this was sometimes the case. "But the fair trade system," she said in an e-mail message, "is the only mechanism that begins to guarantee small-scale farmers the income they need to be able to improve the wages of laborers on their farms." -NY Times