FairTradeCoffee

South Bend Tribune Article: Feb. 17, 2004

Joe Dits - Tribune Staff Writer

Cup of Justice

GOSHEN -- Anna Newburn scanned the dirt-floor home in El Salvador where she was about to sleep for the night.

She noticed the family's 10-year-old and 4-year-old. "But where is your other child?" she kept asking Pedro, president of a coffee cooperative whose title and administrative work belie his living conditions.

Newburn looked into the corrugated metal walls of Pedro's home, the sticks that formed the joints, the vinyl tarp that served as a wall and what seemed like a lump of vegetables hanging from a hammock. That lump was Pedro's 4-month-old baby.

"He kept telling me, 'I'm fixing up my house. I'm fixing up my house,' " said Newburn, a 21-year-old middle-class Goshen College student who'd come to witness the life of coffee growers -- and the effect of "fair trade" prices.

She slept in the hammock, covered with a blanket that didn't protect her from flea bites or the flapping wings of the chicken that roamed the house. Pedro hopes to build up his 6-month-old home. Little by little. Maybe it will have concrete-brick walls like the home of his wife's parents.

Pedro and the others in the Las Colinas cooperative, a two-hour drive from the capital of San Salvador, sell their coffee to a fair-trade group that guarantees a significantly higher price than the market typically pays.

The cash may not lead a family out of poverty, but in the words of another grower, it's enough to send his son to school.

Newburn and three other communication students from Goshen College shot photos and videotape and took notes on their journey to the mountains of El Salvador in late January, all part of a journalism project on global economics.

They learned that, behind the coffee bean du jour, is a grower who struggles against the glut of coffee on the market, rapidly falling prices for his labor, the fickle nature of his crop and the hard economics of his nation. They joined the college's public relations director, Rachel Lapp, and professor Duane Stoltzfus, a former New York Times journalist.

Part of their funding came from the Mennonite Central Committee, which, like the college, is connected to the Mennonite Church USA. One of their hosts in El Salvador was Equal Exchange, which is among the many U.S.-based socially conscious groups that clip out a slew of middlemen in this business. Most of the cost in a cup or bag of coffee is slurped up by the country that consumes the product -- through marketing, transportation, retail and coffee shop costs.

The coffee of Equal Exchange and other fair-trade groups is easily recognized by their special labels. Starbucks, by far the largest coffee shop chain in the United States, states on its Web site that it has purchased a growing amount of fair-trade coffee since forming an alliance with TransFair USA in 2000. This product remains a fraction of what Starbucks sells. And a growing number of churches across the country are brewing only fair-trade coffee in their meeting halls, especially as Equal Exchange promotes itself through an "interfaith program."

Joel Fath, a junior, and senior Celeste Kennel-Shank, who both went on the trip, said they are part of a student group talking with Goshen College's cafeteria service to see whether it would serve fair-trade coffee on campus.

Struggle to carve a profit
Prices in the stores may not show it, but a glut of coffee on the world market is causing a painful drop in prices paid to growers. Unroasted coffee sold for an average of $1.20 across the globe in the 1980s, compared with about 50 cents now, according to the International Coffee Organization.

Equal Exchange pays $1.26 per pound for conventional beans and $1.41 for organic. Prices have fallen most sharply in the past five years as the world's No. 1 grower, Brazil, grew even more coffee and as Vietnam went from very little production to No. 2 on the list, according to the ICO.

On top of that, cooperative farmers like Pedro have trouble carving out a profit because they have to share expenses for machinery and pay exorbitant 20 percent to 30 percent interest rates on payments for their land, Newburn said.

Fath and Kennel-Shank visited two Mennonite volunteers who'd like to help more farmers but can only buy as much fair-trade coffee as the demand allows. The upshot of that, volunteers said: Coffee drinkers in the United States need to ask for and buy coffee with the fair-trade labels.

Organic matters
Growers can also leverage a higher price by growing organic goods, and many are trying to convert their farms to this process. They save by not using costly chemicals but must invest a lot more labor and time. It generally takes a few years before a farm is certified as organic.

Fath recalled the 5-pound recipe for organic pesticide for one tree: a stew of garlic, red onion, hot chilis, Castile soap and a neem tree leaf. Coffee crops need a lot of mothering. The plant is a large shrub or small tree that takes a few years to establish itself in carefully nurtured soil. Tall trees must be planted among coffee plants to give the crop the right amount of shade. The arabica plant, which offers the highest quality coffee and which is common throughout Central America, is especially prone to pest infestations.

One benefit of fair-trade prices is that growers can afford to work all year on pruning, clearing brush and maintaining their crops, leading to better yields, Newburn said.

'Gold on a Mayan temple'
The Goshen group saw the farmers during harvest.

The laborers strip coffee berries from the trees by hand, letting their deft fingers glide strategically down the branches as if they were playing a harp. The berries cascade into baskets strapped around the pickers' waists, holding up to 25 or 40 pounds at a time, Kennel-Shank said.

From truckloads, water sweeps the berries into a large copper cylinder, pushing them through holes that strip away the outer pulp. The red ones pop through first because they are soft and ripe, followed by the yellow and green ones that will make for lower grade coffee. The beans are washed clean, then laid on a patio in the sun to dry, where they appear "like mounds of gold on a Mayan temple," Kennel-Shank wrote for the student newspaper.

The beans are then tied into 150-pound bags, shipped to a roaster in the United States and roasted black. "They're interested in producing really good quality coffee," Lapp said of the growers. "They're experts and they're always looking to make a better quality coffee."

"They don't drink their own best coffee," Stoltzfus said. The good stuff is worth money. It pays for necessities like food and education. "In some cases, they drink instant coffee because it's cheaper."

Staff writer Joseph Dits:
jdits@sbtinfo.com

(574) 235-6158

[as taken from www.southbendtribune.com: February 17, 2004]