FairTradeCoffee

Pura Vida Coffees come to Goshen College

Fair trade coffee fills cups and mugs as it's aroma wafts through the air on the campus of Goshen College. Patrons of the Leaf Raker, as of Thursday, February 19, 2004, had the option of purchasing fair trade coffee, distributed by Pura Vida Coffees.

The price per cup remains the same at $1.05 for 12 ounces; however, a free refill is not available as it is with the other line of coffee offered.

Joe Rondinelli, director of Sodexho campus food services, placed an announcement in Thursday's campus communicator introducing the new option. On the first day, three decanters of coffee were sold; representing roughly half a pound ground beans. On Friday, the amount of coffee sold doubled to six decanters. "I expect in the coming weeks to sell pounds of coffee each day," said Rondinelli.

Pura Vida Coffee is based in Seattle and had this to say about it's coffee on their web page: "When you buy Pura Vida Coffee, you get more than a great cup of coffee. Our premium beans, hand-roasted in small batches, provide unsurpassed flavor and fullness. Because Pura Vida specializes in Fair Trade and organic coffee, you help a farmer sustain his family and protect the environment with every cup you drink."

Erin Bontrager, a senior, said the fair trade coffee tastes much better than the other gourmet bean coffee on sale.

This coming Tuesday, the business department will meet with a representative from Alliance World Coffees to discuss various questions pertaining to the new coffee shop planned for the space originally known as the Kratz-Miller lounge. Stay tuned to next week's Goshen College Record for an article detailing the specifics of the new coffee shop.

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]

Goshen College Record Articles: Jan. 29, 2004

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.

Welcome to the new Blog!

Greetings El Salvador delegation members and others,

Yes, indeed, you have happened upon the "official" fair-trade coffee blog.

Allow me to take this time to introduce you all to the world of blogging. As I mentioned to the Equal Exchange delegates in San Salvador, a blog, or web log, is a dynamic web page. As a member of the community it is pertinent that you post information every now and then. Without the support of you, your stories and actions this will be a very boring page.

I envision this space to be a center to which we can come and post our own articles, links to other articles and any information pertaining to the work of teaching fair-trade.

I know blogging is new to many of you. To begin with, you can click on the link just below each entry labeled "comment." In this dialogue box you can comment on the entry without having to sign up for an account. Invitations for the account will be coming shortly, once I have e-mail contacts of members who traveled to El Salvador.

Any photos you want to post, please e-mail them to me and I resize them to download and fit on our blog.

Any articles you want to post, please e-mail the text to me or the link to text and I will post them for now.

I look forward to staying in touch with you all as well spread the word about fair-trade coffee.