Mountainside to breakfast table: how coffee is made

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 whoÕs 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.

Jose 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.

(Celeste traveled to El Salvador as a writer)