Greetings all. Below are three articles by Duane, Celeste and myself wrote. If you want, you can see some of the photos online at The Record: Trip to El Salvador, our college's newspaper where the aforementioned articles were featured this week. Sojourners has also expressed interest in an article and photos. This is Sojourners' web address Sojourners. We will keep you posted as to when more articles appear in various media outlets.
Duane Stoltzfus -
Having visited El Salvador, even if only for a week, a cup of coffee will never taste the same.Equal Exchange, an importer from outside Boston that helped to originate the fair-trade coffee movement in the U.S., sponsored the interfaith delegation that included six of us from Goshen College, four Presbyterians from Nebraska and West Virginia, and a Methodist minister, also from Nebraska. Our guides came from CRISPAZ, Christians for Peace in El Salvador.
As you would expect, we drank a lot of coffee: for breakfast, for lunch, for afternoon pick-me-ups. (A member of the Goshen group confessed on the way down that he did not actually drink coffee, but at that hour it was too late to turn around.)
Back in Goshen, one avid coffee drinker (milk, no sugar) takes a sip and remembers:
- Jose Antonio, who walks an impossibly steep dirt road, an hour each way, to harvest coffee at the Las Colinas cooperative, and returns home by foot for a meal of corn tortillas and beans.
- Carmencita, who graciously prepared coffee and all of the meals at the guest house where we stayed in San Salvador, and who, on the last night, told stories of her “muy duro” work on a coffee plantation in years past.
- Archbishop Oscar Romero, a champion of the poor and dispossessed, who was assassinated in 1980, and who now is the people’s saint, seemingly present everywhere in image and in spirit.
With world coffee prices at a 30-year low, growers in El Salvador are hard pressed to survive. Equal Exchange and other fair-trade providers offer hope by buying directly from coffee cooperatives at prices that guarantee a living wage to small farmers. The forces of the global economy can be overwhelming (fair-trade coffee is about 2 percent of the market, but growing).
Still, it helps to know that cup by cup, fair-trade coffee can make a difference.
Celeste Kennel-Shank -
Enjoying a cup of coffee in the morning doesn't often bring to mind images of hard work on mountainous terrain from dawn to nightfall. For coffee farmers in El Salvador, producing the popular beverage requires intense labor for which they are not always fairly compensated.In recent years, coffee prices have "spiked" and "plunged" according to Anna Utech, an interfaith department member of Equal Exchange, a fair-trade coffee importer in Massachusetts formed with the principle of providing a living wage to producers. "Anyone who’s ever known a farmer knows you can't survive with such uncertainty," said Utech. Equal Exchange developed the fair-trade business model to ensure stable income to small farmers.
Every morning during the harvest in the months of December and January workers who operate a coffee depulping machine receive truckfulls of fresh coffee fruit. Families of the Las Colinas cooperative, parents and children, collected this fruit from plants on the mountainsides. The fruit slides from the back of a truck into a pit in a cascade of red and yellow. It is then put through machines with huge copper grated barrels that remove the soft outer fruit.
The coffee passes through pipes onto a large brick patio with many layers. There it dries in the sun, appearing like mounds of gold on a Mayan temple. When it is dry, another machine removes the husks, it is cleaned and packed in 150-pound bags to be tested for quality and then shipped to Equal Exchange.
José Luis Castillo, a member of the Las Colinas cooperative, works every day of the week during the harvest from before dawn until midnight. Though he works hard, he is rewarded for his labor through the higher price of fair trade and an extra premium for community development. He hopes that access to the fair-trade market will become available to more coffee cooperatives in El Salvador. "We want to involve more people-the whole country," Castillo said.
In the process of learning, as Castillo said, "how our coffee gets to your tables," a group from Goshen College traveled to El Salvador last week. They plan to spend the next months educating the campus and wider community through presentations, articles and a documentary video.
Joel Fath -
Although my duties on this delegation included putting a narrow box in front of my eye, I returned to Goshen with a broader picture of fair-trade coffee.Through varied interactions with members of coffee cooperatives, established with egalitarian business models, I learned about the complex process involved in placing a cup of organic, fair-trade coffee in my hands. From the recipe for organic fertilizer to how one can use insects as pesticides, I now know enough—if I owned my own mountain—to start an organic coffee plantation.
Now that I am back in Goshen, catching up on a week of missed work, I consider each cup of coffee a symbol of a system, a system built on just economics and consideration for the producer. With each cup of Café El Salvador I drink, my mind returns to the steep slopes of El Pinal’s coffee cooperative and Ana Gladys Molina.Alongside her husband and daughter, Ana quickly strips coffee trees of its red fruit, filling a basket resting on her hip. For each 25 pounds she harvests, Ana receives 92 cents—the highest amount paid in surrounding communities.
In addition to paying a fair wage, members of the El Pinal cooperative receive a fair-trade premium for each pound of coffee sold to a fair-trade vendor. With this premium the cooperative can pay for a health worker to visit each month, improve roads and increase school funding.As I hold my photos in one hand and coffee in another, I look to the future, excited about spreading the word on fair-trade coffee.