Three Different Promises on a Rooibos Label

A tin of rooibos may carry an organic seal, a Fair Trade mark, a Rainforest Alliance frog, or nothing at all. These are not versions of the same promise. Each verifies a different thing: how the field is farmed, what the grower was paid, how the land and its workers are treated. No scheme is required to call the plant rooibos in the first place; that protection is a separate matter of law.

Organic rooibos stayed a niche at home

Of the three ethical labels available to a rooibos grower, organic is the smallest domestic result. Certification against the American, European, and Japanese organic standards exists, yet as recently as 2010, less than one percent of rooibos sales inside South Africa carried an organic certification, according to a 2010 South African agricultural training curriculum.

The same curriculum put the organic share of rooibos actually leaving the country at 15 to 18 percent, far higher than the local figure, with Japan (not Germany, the biggest overall buyer of rooibos) as the largest single market for the organic version. It also recorded the incentive thinning out: rooibos's average price had fallen over the preceding five years. Organic supply had grown enough that the certified premium had narrowed to just 40 South African cents per kilogram (about 5 US cents at 2010 exchange rates) above the conventional price by 2010.

Fair Trade carries a fixed premium

Fair Trade certification arrived in the rooibos industry around 2006, probably the first voluntary certification scheme that made inroads, and Klipopmekaar suggests why: unlike organic, Fair Trade carries a mandatory price premium, paid on top of the market price. Fairtrade International's own minimum price and premium table sets it at five rand per kilogram (about US$0.30 at today's rates) for a small producer organisation, a rate unchanged since 2008.

Fair Trade operations included the Heiveld and Wupperthal cooperatives. The same Fairtrade table sets a higher premium for hired-labour estates, twelve rand per kilogram (about US$0.70 at today's rates). Klipopmekaar's history counts 19 South African farming operations certified to Fair Trade, Rainforest Alliance and UTZ standards.

The industry tried to build its own standard, and it did not survive

The South African Rooibos Council backed an attempt to write a homegrown sustainability standard rather than import one. The Rooibos Biodiversity Initiative launched in 2007, led by conservationist Gerhard Pretorius with first-year funding from the Critical Ecosystems Partnership Fund, and by September 2008 it had published Biodiversity Best Practice Guidelines covering farm management and environmental protection specific to the Cape.

By 2010 the project was known as Right Rooibos, meant to exceed international standards such as Fair Trade. It failed to secure broad-based alignment and suffered from a lack of resources, Klipopmekaar's history records, and once funding for the project ended in March 2014, Right Rooibos stopped operating.

A rainforest standard, rewritten for a mountain with no rainforest

Two international certifiers arrived in 2011, and Right Rooibos halted its plan for an industry label after they did. UTZ built its rooibos-specific Code of Conduct through a series of stakeholder workshops with the industry, finalising it on 23 March 2011 after a pilot with commercial farms, smallholder growers, and processors. Unlike Fair Trade, UTZ sets no fixed premium; buyer and seller negotiate one directly.

Rainforest Alliance arrived the same year with a harder problem: its Sustainable Agriculture Network standard had been written for tropical rainforest farming, a poor match for the Cederberg's dry sandstone fynbos. From June 2011 the organisation worked through a Rooibos Interpretation Guideline to adapt the standard to South African conditions, work that continues today under a rooibos-specific policy the certifier still maintains and updates. Rainforest Alliance certification does carry a mandatory premium, roughly 43 South African cents (about 2.5 US cents at today's rates), by Klipopmekaar's account, smaller than Fair Trade's.

In June 2017, Rainforest Alliance and UTZ announced plans to merge into a single certifying body, with the corporate merger itself closing in 2018 and a single combined standard following in 2020. Han de Groot, UTZ's executive director at the time, gave the reason for joining forces: many farms were certified to two or three standards at once, "and this doesn't do a good service to them or bring many additional benefits."

What actually decides who gets certified

More years of schooling and a larger farm both raised the odds of certification, while renting or borrowing the land a farmer worked lowered them, and income from outside the farm made certification more affordable to pursue. Belonging to a farmers' association reduced the odds of certification rather than raising them. In the same survey, fewer than two farmers in a hundred said they held no certification of any kind, while more than three in ten said they had never heard of a quality assurance system at all.

A label buys specificity, not flavour

A label is a promise about a process, verified by someone outside the farm, not a verdict on the tea itself. Organic tells you how the field itself was managed. Fair Trade tells you a fixed premium per kilogram was paid on top of the price. Rainforest Alliance and UTZ, now one standard, tell you an outside body checked in on the land and the workers. None of the three tells you anything about flavour, and none of them is the protection that keeps the word rooibos itself from being sold on a plant grown elsewhere.