The fair-trade market is still small, but fast-growing, and it has been a boon in places like Varginha, Brazil, where coffee roasters like Café Bom Dia, above, work directly with small farmers.

By ANDREW DOWNIE

Published: October 2, 2007

VARGINHA, Brazil — Rafael de Paiva was skeptical at first. If he wanted a “fair trade” certification for his coffee crop, the Brazilian farmer would have to adhere to a long list of rules on pesticides, farming techniques, recycling and other matters. He even had to show that his children were enrolled in school.

More farmers are likely to receive such offers, as importers and retailers rush to meet a growing demand from consumers and activists to adhere to stricter environmental and social standards.

Mr. Paiva’s beans will be in the store-brand coffee sold by Sam’s Club, the warehouse chain of Wal-Mart Stores. Dunkin’ Donuts, McDonald’s and Starbucks already sell some fair trade coffee.

“We see a real momentum now with big companies and institutions switching to fair trade,” said Paul Rice, president and chief executive of TransFair USA, the only independent fair trade certifier in the United States.

The International Fair Trade Association, an umbrella group of organizations in more than 70 countries, defines fair trade as reflecting “concern for the social, economic and environmental well-being of marginalized small producers” and does “not maximize profit at their expense.”

According to Fairtrade Labelling Organizations International, a group of fair trade certifiers, consumers spent approximately $2.2 billion on certified products in 2006, a 42 percent increase over the previous year, benefiting over seven million people in developing countries.

Like consumer awareness of organic products a decade ago, fair trade awareness is growing. In 2006, 27 percent of Americans said they were aware of the certification, up from 12 percent in 2004, according to a study by the New-York based National Coffee Association.

Fair trade products that have experienced the biggest jump in demand include coffee, cocoa and cotton, according to the Fairtrade Labelling Organizations.

Dozens of other products, including tea, pineapples, wine and flowers, are certified by organizations that visit farmers to verify that they are meeting the many criteria that bar, among other things, the use of child labor and harmful chemicals.

There is no governmental standard for fair trade certification, the same situation as with “organic” until a few years ago. Some fair trade produce also carries the organic label, but most does not. One important difference is the focus of the labels: organic refers to how food is cultivated, while fair trade is primarily concerned with the condition of the farmer and his laborers.

Big chains are marketing fair trade coffee to varying degrees. All the espresso served at the 5,400 Dunkin’ Donuts stores in the United States, for example, is fair trade. All McDonald’s stores in New England sell only fair trade coffee. And in 2006, Starbucks bought 50 percent more fair trade coffee than in 2005.

Fair trade produce remains a minuscule percentage of world trade, but it is growing. Only 3.3 percent of coffee sold in the United States in 2006 was certified fair trade, but that was more than eight times the level in 2001, according to TransFair USA.

Although Sam’s Club already sells seven fair trade imports, including coffee, this will be the first time it has put its Member’s Mark label on a fair trade product, which Mr. Rice of TransFair called “a statement of their commitment to fair trade.”

He added, “The impact in terms of volume and the impact in terms of the farmers and their families is quite dramatic.”

Michael Ellgass, the director of house brands for Sam’s Club, said the company could afford to pay fair trade’s premium because it has reduced the number of middlemen.

Coffee usually passes from farmers through roasters, packers, traders, shippers and warehouses before arriving in stores. But Sam’s Club will buy shelf-ready merchandise directly from Café Bom Dia, the roaster here in Brazil’s lush coffee country.  –> minimizing the cost by eliminating extensive processing lines and  reducing transaction fees

“We are cutting a number of steps out of the process by working directly with the farmer,” Mr. Ellgass said.

Some critics of fair trade say that working with thousands of small farmers makes strict adherence to fair trade rules difficult. -> counterargument for Pro-free trade

Others argue that fair trade coffee is as exploitive as the conventional kind, especially in countries that produce the highest-quality beans — like Colombia, Ethiopia and Guatemala. Fair trade farmers there are barely paid more than their counterparts in Brazil, though their crops become gourmet brands, selling for a hefty markup, said Geoff Watts, vice president for coffee at Chicago’s Intelligentsia Coffee and Tea, a coffee importer.

But in Brazil, a nation with little top-grade coffee, the partnership between small producers and big retailers is a better blend, Mr. Watts said.

Fair trade coffee farmers in Brazil are paid at least $1.29 a pound, compared with the current market rate of roughly $1.05 per pound, said Sydney Marques de Paiva, president of Café Bom Dia.

Most coffee farmers are organized into cooperatives, and some of that premium finances community projects like schools or potable water.

Like most of his cooperative’s 3,000-odd members — and three-quarters of coffee growers worldwide — Mr. Paiva, the coffee farmer (no relation to Mr. Marques de Paiva), farms less than 25 acres of land. He produces around 200 132-pound sacks for the co-op, with 70 percent of that sold as fair trade to Café Bom Dia.

The company would buy more if there were more of a market for fair trade coffee, it said.

The fair trade crop brought Mr. Paiva about 258 reais ($139) a sack, compared with about 230 reais for the sacks that were not fair trade. For the latest crop, that meant an additional 3,920 reais ($2,116) for him, a huge sum here in the impoverished mountains of Minas.

“It’s been great for us,” Mr. Paiva said with a huge, toothless grin. “I call the people from the co-op my family now.”

Mr. Ellgass, the Sam’s Club executive, said the chain hoped to expand its fair trade goods.

So do Brazil’s farmers. “Everybody is doing their best to come up to standard so we can sell our coffee as fair trade,” said Conceição Peres da Costa, one of the co-op’s growers. “Everybody wants to earn as much as he can.”

When Israelis look at the Arab awakening, they compare it to Tehran in 1979, not Prague in 1989. Such sentiments seemed churlish as Arab dictators fell, but now—with the military clinging to power in Egypt, Libya failing to form a strong government, and Syria descending into civil war—Israelis feel vindicated in their pessimism.
The new regimes, the chaotic regional situation, and the Israeli reactions to them, have the potential to complicate the U.S.–Israel relationship further, making it harder for the United States to benefit from the Arab awakening. In the end, however, it is in Israel’s interest, as well as Washington’s, that the regional transformation is peaceful. It is Israel’s role in the Arab awakening that I explore in my chapter, “Israel: A Frosty Response to the Arab Spring” in The Arab Awakening: America and the Transformation of the Middle East.

Israelis fear that long-time allies like Egypt will end up as enemies. While the relationship with Egypt under Mubarak was far from warm and fuzzy, Mubarak was a reliable ally against terrorists and Iran. Now Mubarak has been replaced by, well, that’s the question. Israelis worry that an Islamist regime might rip up the peace treaty or, less dramatically, simply stop helping Israel contain Hamas in Gaza. In addition, they fear that any regime will be too focused on staying in power to police the Sinai and other chaotic areas where terrorists hide.

Given Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad’s hostility towards Israel and ties to Iran, Israelis would be happy to see him go. But they worry that a replacement regime might be weak or hostile. Syria’s past suggests the danger of instability to Israel. Salah Jadid, the predecessor to Bashar al-Assad’s father Hafez, whipped up popular sentiment against Israel, agitating on behalf of the Palestinians to the point where the situation spiraled into war in 1967—a conflict that Damascus was not prepared to fight, and one which resulted in the loss of the Golan Heights to Israel. Hafez’s son Bashar takes more risks, but he too recognizes that an open clash with Israel would be disastrous for Syria and his regime. Relations between Syria and Israel are governed by many rules, most of which are unspoken but are nevertheless quite real. Changes in Syria could bring to power a new government that does not know these subtle rules and, again, plays to popular opinion rather than strategic reality.

Even if Assad stays in power, he may feel compelled to stir up anger against Israel to divert the pressure of popular opinion. Already in May and June 2011, as unrest swept across Syria, the regime there encouraged (some reports say coerced) Palestinians to march on Israel across the Syrian border into the Golan Heights, leading to more than a dozen deaths—Syria claims far more. The weakness of the Assad government, as well as any conceivable replacement, makes peace even less likely as no government could risk the potential unpopularity of cutting a deal with Israel.

More broadly, given how strong anti-Israel sentiment is in much of the Arab world, Israelis do not trust public opinion. A 2010 University of Maryland/Zogby poll found that almost 90 percent of Arabs saw Israel as “the biggest threat to you.”[1]  “The ugly facts,” said former defense minister Moshe Arens, “are that the two peace treaties that Israel concluded so far—the one with Egypt and the other with Jordan—were both signed with dictators: Anwar Sadat and King Hussein.”[2]  In other words, Israelis fear that the Mubaraks, Husseins, and other dictators are as good as it will get for Israel because these leaders are outside the mainstream of their societies.

The United States will be caught between its commitment to Israel and its desire to gain the goodwill of the new Arab leaders and advance democratization in the region. U.S. regional interests go well beyond the security of Israel, of course, embracing issues from counterterrorism to energy security. These issues require the United States to work with Arab governments, both old and new, all the while knowing that hostility between them and Israel will make progress all the more difficult.

In the end, regional revolutions can work to Israel’s benefit. Change, however, must be managed properly. Israel must recognize the new regional dynamics, including the potential for escalation and the political realities of its neighbors and potential peace partners. Such recognition will not make the new challenges go away, but they will make Israel ready to seize opportunities for peace and less likely to engage in a dangerous escalation that could spiral into disaster.

February 11, 2012

WASHINGTON

ON a Sunday in early December, Marcus Brauchli, the executive editor of The Washington Post, summoned some of the newspaper’s most celebrated journalists to a lunch at his home, a red brick arts-and-crafts style in the suburb of Bethesda, Md.

He asked his guests, who included the Pulitzer Prize winners Bob Woodward, Dana Priest, David Maraniss and Rick Atkinson, along with Dan Balz, the paper’s chief correspondent, and Robert G. Kaiser, a senior writer and editor who has been with the paper since 1963, to help him — and The Post.

He wanted to know how they thought The Post was covering the 2012 election and what might be improved. The paper, they told him, needed to strike a better balance between the ferocious 24/7 news cycle and more ambitious longer-term projects. Newsroom morale was suffering and needed his attention.

The meeting was an unusual gesture from Mr. Brauchli. In the nearly three and a half years since he became the first outsider to run the paper in seven decades, he has often fought perceptions that he is inattentive to concerns of his staff members.

But Mr. Brauchli is acutely aware of the tension that lies at the heart of his mission — a tension being faced not just by newspapers but by media companies in music, film, books, magazines and television. He is charged with maintaining the standards and legacy of a great institution — in this case, the newspaper of Katharine Graham, Ben Bradlee and Mr. Woodward and Carl Bernstein — while confronting the harsh reality that in the digital age, the grandeur is gone.

Mr. Brauchli refuses to be held hostage to the past. “There are a lot of nostalgia-drenched people in the journalism field who look back at what newspapers were and have a fairly static view of what they should be,” he said in an interview. “Just because The Washington Post used to be a certain way doesn’t mean The Washington Post has to be that way in the future.”

The Post faces the same problems as other daily newspapers, whose revenues have sunk as the Web and the tough economy have sapped advertising. But in some ways, its situation is even more daunting. Unlike most other papers with national aspirations, The Post serves a purely local print market, one that for decades had limited competition, and it has depended on local advertisers and subscribers who have since fled to the Web.

Though company managers say privately that The Post is modestly profitable, its newspaper division, which also includes a group of community papers and The Herald of Everett, Wash., reported an operating loss of nearly $26 million through the first three quarters of last year.

Compounding its troubles, The Post’s safety net ripped a giant hole. For decades, The Post could rely on Kaplan — the money-minting, for-profit college and test-preparation business that the company bought in 1984. But Kaplan has been squeezed under the weight of new federal rules that place greater limits on how for-profit colleges can recruit and enroll low-income students.

Once by far the largest and fastest-growing business in the Washington Post Company, Kaplan is now a laggard. Education accounts for less operating income than two divisions that were historically less crucial to its profits, cable and broadcast television, according to the latest financial reports.

That has left the newspaper and the company’s other businesses exposed. The newsroom, once with more than 1,000 employees, now stands at less than 640 people, depleted by buyouts and staff defections. The newspaper’s Style section, once one of the most coveted assignments in American journalism, has shrunk from nearly 100 people to a quarter of that size. Bureaus in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago are gone. There were so many Friday afternoon cake-cutting send-offs for departing employees last summer that editors had to coordinate them so they didn’t overlap.

“The survival of the institution is not guaranteed,” Mr. Kaiser said in an interview before the December lunch. Over the course of his five-decade career with The Post, he has been a summer intern, a metro reporter, a foreign correspondent and the No. 2 to Len Downie, Mr. Brauchli’s predecessor.

“When I was managing editor of The Washington Post, everything we did was better than anyone in the business,” he said. “We had the best weather, the best comics, the best news report, the fullest news report. Today, there’s a competitor who does every element of what we do, and many of them do it better. We’ve lost our edge in some very profound and fundamental ways.”

Last week, the paper announced a fresh round of voluntary buyouts, an effort to cut 20 more positions as managers reckoned once again with the painful reality that The Post was not making enough money to support the staff it employed.

Mr. Brauchli has reacted to the upheaval by overseeing one of the most sweeping and closely watched reorientations of any newsroom in the country. The editors now stress online metrics and freely borrow from the playbooks of more nimble online competitors like Politico and The Huffington Post.

The outcome of their efforts could offer a high-profile case study on how a company can foster an entrepreneurial, digital culture while remaining true to its heritage. But the transformation has been far from easy. There have been tensions in the newsroom and visible fissures between Mr. Brauchli and his own publisher.

The Post has expanded its Web presence by trying to meld what was great about the old Post with new traffic-baiting tricks of online start-ups — creating new, high-minded blogs like Ezra Klein’s “Wonkblog,” along with “Celebritology 2.0” where news about the Kardashian sisters and Justin Bieber can be found. That has many inside the paper starting to wonder if online growth has come at too high a cost.

UNTIL just two years ago, the Washington Post Company was considerably behind many of its competitors in innovating on the Web. Its digital and print operations were even separated by a state line. The Web site’s offices were across the Potomac River in Virginia and run by a different set of managers.

That changed after Mr. Brauchli and Katharine Weymouth, the Post’s publisher, integrated the two sides in the first half of 2009. Journalists whose primary responsibilities are to the Web site now work next to reporters in The Post’s headquarters on 15th Street in downtown Washington. Under the direction of Raju Narisetti, one of two managing editors brought in by Mr. Brauchli, the Post newsroom was reoriented to think about one primary goal: bringing the most visitors as possible to Washingtonpost.com.

Mr. Narisetti, who left the paper last month for a new job at The Wall Street Journal, where both he and Mr. Brauchli had worked before The Post, brought large flat-screen monitors into the newsroom that projected in real time what the most popular stories were online. He installed a new internal publishing system that required reporters to identify Google-friendly key words and flag them before their stories could be edited.

There are 35 different daily reports that track traffic to different parts of the Web site. Editors receive a midday performance alert, telling them whether the site is on track to meet its traffic goals for the day. If it appears that they might miss their goal, editors will order up fresher content.

“I’ve been at lunch, opened up that e-mail and called people and said: ‘Looks like we’re not delivering enough content. What can we put up?’ ” Mr. Narisetti said in an interview before his departure.

Top editors have embraced the view that studying traffic patterns can be a useful way to determine where to focus the paper’s resources.

“Let’s say you’re looking at your local staff, and because of pressures you need to move people. So you’re telling the local editor, here is the data, here are the business needs of our audience,” he said. “And in some cases people have moved an editor into a reporting role, or people have said we are reorganizing these beats so we don’t need four people covering this system. We can have three.”

Traffic isn’t the only factor that editors examine when determining whether to kill or expand a blog. They can look at where online visitors are when they read the site. And if their computers are registered with a government suffix — .gov, .mil, .senate or .house — editors know they are reaching the readers they want. “That’s our influential audience,” Mr. Narisetti said. “If a blog is over all not doing that great but has a higher percentage of those, we say don’t worry about it.”

Post employees are regularly schooled in the lingo of Web traffic. In memos to the staff, Mr. Brauchli is as likely to cite terms like page views, unique visitors and social media referrals as he is to laud a journalistic achievement. At the beginning of the month, he started an e-mail to the newsroom this way: “January was an excellent month for us digitally. We surpassed all our previous records. We beat our monthly records for page views by 9 percent, for visits by 14 percent and for unique visitors by 12 percent.”

He added: “Growing everywhere is a sign that we are adapting effectively to what our readers want.” By one important measure, The Post’s efforts are paying off. Recently, it has averaged 19.6 million unique visitors a month, according to comScore, making it the second-most-visited American newspaper Web site, behind that of The New York Times.

Mr. Narisetti and Mr. Brauchli were close partners in the digital reinvention of the newsroom, but their relationship became tense at times toward the end. In one spat witnessed by reporters in December, Mr. Brauchli confronted Mr. Narisetti in the newsroom over an erroneous blog post that said Mitt Romney was using language from the Ku Klux Klan in his speeches. The item forced the paper to issue an uncharacteristically self-flagellating correction citing “multiple, serious factual errors that undermine its premise.”

In an interview before his departure, Mr. Narisetti was asked if he believed that the newsroom would be the same size at the end of this year. “One thing no editor in any newsroom in this country can avoid saying is that it will be smaller,” he said, adding that if his bosses asked him how many people he needed to put out the paper, “the chances are we wouldn’t say 630 people.”

Despite the emphasis on digital delivery, The Post has continued to thrive by more conventional measures. Mr. Brauchli points to the journalistic distinctions under his watch, including five Pulitzer Prizes, and articles like an investigation into the insurance giant AIG and its role in the economic collapse of 2008.

“The Washington Post doesn’t need to cover everything,” he said. “But what it does cover it will cover well. I think the staff of any newsroom today surely understands that we are in a fast-changing industry, facing constant competitive pressure, significant economic challenges and great opportunities to rethink how we cover things.”

Some who were around when The Post’s mission was to cover everything said they understood how hard Mr. Brauchli’s job was, and they think he did not always get the credit he deserved.

“Whatever you’re going to say about the paper and where it is, it’s a time of convulsion for all newspapers,” Mr. Woodward said. “But you have an absolute first-class news person in charge who really does have the clarity, zeal and drive of Bradlee.”

NO one bears the weight of The Post’s legacy more than Katharine Weymouth, the paper’s 45-year-old publisher and the fifth member of her family to hold that title. Her grandmother was the beloved Post matriarch, Katharine Graham. Her uncle is Donald E. Graham, the former publisher and now chief executive of the Post Company. It is a testament to Mr. Graham’s standing among his employees that despite the difficult times, few hold him in anything but the highest esteem.

Mr. Graham, who graduated from Harvard and was drafted into the Vietnam War, joined the Washington police department before taking a job as a Post reporter. Ms. Weymouth, who grew up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, attended the Brearley School and then Harvard, had an indirect path to The Post of a different sort. After graduating from the Stanford Law School, she moved to Washington to work as a corporate lawyer.

In 1996, she joined The Post as an assistant counsel and was named publisher in February 2008, right as the Great Recession was getting under way. In one of her first major decisions, she surprised the newsroom by reaching outside the organization for Mr. Brauchli, who had accepted a large payout and resigned from his previous job, running The Wall Street Journal under its new owner, Rupert Murdoch.

In Mr. Brauchli, she saw the kind of leader who could be a strong partner in shaping the company’s business strategy for the next generation. “I think he came in with his eyes wide open,” she said in an interview.

Mr. Brauchli was also willing to take on the undesirable task of paring down the newsroom. “It’s a job that Ben Bradlee didn’t have to do, and that Len Downie only had to do a little bit of,” she said, referring to the paper’s previous two executive editors.

Ms. Weymouth is a careful student of her family’s history, even if she says legacy isn’t something she spends a lot of time thinking about. “I just can’t think like that,” she said.

Her tenure got off to a rocky start. In the summer of 2009, Ms. Weymouth had to apologize after it became public that The Post was planning to charge lobbyists and others for access to exclusive “salons” at her home. Seeking a new revenue stream, the company wanted to create a series of events featuring Post journalists that would attract sponsors. Though magazines host similar conferences all the time, it seemed particularly undignified for an institution as esteemed as The Post. And the blowback was fierce.

Though Mr. Brauchli always understood his job would entail how to put out a daily newspaper and run a 24/7 Web site with shrinking resources, some of his editors have noticed that his relationship with the publisher has cooled.

One veteran newsroom manager said Mr. Brauchli has described “a constant fight” with the publisher over making further cuts. In an act that went largely unmentioned at the paper, Mr. Brauchli refused to accept a bonus one year, this person added.

Though such a gesture, coming as it did when the paper was reducing staff significantly, may have helped lift morale and engender good will, Mr. Brauchli chose not to make his decision public. And when Ms. Weymouth wrote a year-end memo to the staff praising its accomplishments and thanking people by name, his name was curiously absent, leading many staff members to believe that she had snubbed him. In fact, said another person who had seen an original draft of the memo, Mr. Brauchli’s name was mentioned in the first version but he asked that it be taken out. He left the misperceptions uncorrected.

Many at The Post are still trying to adjust to life under a new regime, one in which “Donnie-grams,” congratulatory notes from the chief executive, arrive in your in-box along with spreadsheets on the latest Web traffic metrics, and where the walk-around management style of Mr. Bradlee and Mr. Downie is gone. Employees often fault Ms. Weymouth and Mr. Brauchli for not circulating enough in the newsroom. By her own acknowledgment, Ms. Weymouth lacks ease and rapport with the newsroom. Her uncle Don, she said, “has an amazing knack for names that unfortunately I don’t share.”

On election night in 2008, she brought her young daughter into the newsroom to witness Post journalists putting together the paper that would report on President Obama’s historic election. Reporters and editors, most of whom rarely saw their publisher in the newsroom, were taken aback but impressed with what that said about Ms. Weymouth’s attachment to the paper.

“I hope they see me as a champion of the news. I do my best,” she said. She added that she didn’t visit the newsroom “nearly as much as I’d like,” saying: “You get stuck in meetings, you’re traveling. I’d like to get down there a lot more.”

Mr. Brauchli’s own response to the criticism was similar: “The journalism is where I want to spend my time, and the journalism is where my passion is. But there are a lot of issues that require my attention.”

THIS summer, Reuters tried to poach Mr. Balz, one of the country’s most prominent political reporters. Mr. Brauchli and the national editor, Kevin Merida, were loath to see him go — not just because they were wary of more brain drain but also because of the potential damage to newsroom morale from the defection of such a revered and well-liked colleague.

They flew a young political reporter, Philip Rucker, to Michigan, where Mr. Balz was on vacation and considering the Reuters offer. Mr. Rucker appeared on Mr. Balz’s doorstep carrying a basket with cheese and wine and a book they had made called “Campaign Crescendos: The Election-Night Writings of Dan Balz.” Editors and reporters had signed it, urging him to stay.

He declined the Reuters job.

“To me, The Post was and is a great newspaper,” Mr. Balz said. “Is it a different place today than it was? Sure. But in the end it’s still a great place to do great journalism.”