Direct trade

“All actors should sit down at one table and negotiate the price,” that was the dream of Ursula Brunner, one of gebana’s founders. This was meant to make trade direct, as fair and transparent as possible. And thus to provide a counterpoint to today’s global food trade.

Because to get products ready for trade, import and export, they are usually standardized. Shape, color, size – everything is similar, comparable and assessable. The same applies to certifications; they are simply one more standardized attribute. Who the product comes from, which route it has taken and through how many and which hands it passed is no longer traceable.

And it also doesn’t matter for global trade. What matters is only the price at which the goods are purchased. And this should be as low as possible. Although a low price fortunately often goes along with high efficiency, which conserves resources and thus benefits the environment – often it does not. The example of cashew nuts shows this, transported from West Africa to Asia for processing to save a few cents per kilo. That is neither directly traded, nor environmentally friendly or value-adding in the country of origin, yet it could still be sold under a “Fair Trade” label.

Because the informational value of the Fair Trade certification is, by nature, limited. Standardization also occurs here, and with it information about the needs of the producers, their payment, cultivation details and, finally, the route from the field to the consumers is lost – and with it the sense of responsibility.

This is also becoming clear to a steadily growing number of consumers. Companies react quickly by increasingly proclaiming that they source products directly from the producer. “Directly from the farmer” becomes a trend.
Unfortunately, in many cases these are only marketing slogans, in most cases a pious wish, and in a few cases the supply chain is actually more “direct.” Nebulous detours do not even occur out of ill intent. Global trade is so complex and often extremely opaque that it is almost impossible to capture the entire supply chain.

We know this from our own experience. And that is why we also understand the importance of building direct trading channels to farming families and processors ourselves, instead of sourcing the products through the usual routes. Because only then do you really know where the product comes from, how it was processed, and that the money actually reaches the right place.

In many places we are still far from where we want to be with our ideas of control, information and responsibility. But we are getting better. Where we cover the entire supply chain ourselves, we invest even more in the direct relationship with the farmers. And for those products that we purchase, we move closer to the producers and buy more directly.

What does that mean in concrete terms? We present two initiatives here that show what direct trading means to us. We want to improve step by step — until our trading chains are truly as direct and transparent as if we were all sitting at the same table.