Carolina Peace - Need a cup of coffee?----Try a little fair trade

Need a cup of coffee?----Try a little fair trade

Written by Administrator

Thursday, 28 August 2003

Need a cup of coffee?----Try a little fair trade.
Brand seeks to reward troubled coffee farmers

By Brian Ray

Let's say tomorrow morning you look in the mirror and discover that somehow you've been transformed into a Guatemalan coffee farmer. You own a small farm and you have a hardworking spouse and three kids who help around the field. Yet despite the warm climate and love of your loyal family, a world of responsibility and worry has consumed you. Of course, you're working 70 hours a week or more in a sweltering clear-cut jungle, and the fruits of your labor have a market price of $.30 per pound.

You've got three choices. You can crawl in bed and wish upon a star that tomorrow you'll wake up with a different job in a different country. Or you can bemoan your fate internally while picking coffee beans like hot tamales to double your product - which will inevitably drive your price further down. Or you can start scouring the nation for a Fair Trade broker.

This is assuming you don't stand to lose your farm like 60,000 Nicaraguans, or you haven't already lost your job like 30,000 El Salvadorians.

Jay Shreve, owner of a local coffee shop, said Fair Trade coffee is the way to right wrongs and pay small plantation owners what they deserve for their hard work. The system guarantees over three times the market price per pound for coffee planters, paying farmers $1.30 per pound. Currently, Jammin' Java (1530 Main St.) and Cool Beans coffee shop (1217 College Street) are the only coffee shops in Columbia to offer Fair Trade coffee.

"I first heard about it a few years ago and was very interested in the concept of it," Shreve said.

Shreve said there are quite a few places where the coffee stops before it reaches your cup. He said growers usually sell their beans to processors, who in turn sell it to brokers, who sell it to roasters and then the roaster finally sells it to the drinker.

"Every retailer knows it's the grower that gets treated unfair," Shreve said.

Shreve also said that he buys as much Fair Trade coffee as possible.

OK, this is where all cafe wastrels should slap their foreheads and say, "Oh, that's what the Fair Trade label means."

Not only does Fair Trade guarantee fair pay, but it also ensures quality of product. In order to meet the standards of Fair Trade consumers, the farmer or plantation owner has to grow his beans organically in the shade. This means sans pesticide, which is a good idea since DDT, although banned in many counties in 1972, is still widely available to coffee cultivators. DDT is notorious for damaging the nervous system, liver and kidneys.

If you grows coffee in the shade, it obviously means you can't sun-cultivate your coffee; sun-cultivation results in the vaporization of rainforests' biodiversity by cutting down the homes of hundreds of songbirds and other animals.

Monocropping is also consequently out when you shade grow your coffee because - being the smart farmer you are - you'll know planting banana trees or nut trees will diversify your farm and bring in more money.

Of course, most small farmers can't afford the machinery to clear cut their farms anyway, so all they have to do is make sure they don't slash and burn once they can afford it.

Anyone against the price floors proposed by Fair Trade coffee should note that there was once a price regulating initiative known as the International Coffee Agreement, which controlled the amount of coffee allowed into the market, but the United States helped destroy it in 1989. Now, anyone and everyone are flooding the market because they know we can't live without our coffee in the morning.

Any specialty coffee shop has the power to acquire Fair Trade. If it doesn't, Shreve said, encourage the shop to buy Fair Trade coffee.

Statistics gathered from www.globalexchange.org/coffee.

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3.25 Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved."