In the rugged highlands of
Ethiopia, the birthplace of coffee, local people still harvest
some of the world's best-tasting beans. As Oxfam explains, "The
coffee-growing area in the mountains to the west of the Great
Rift Valley is so ideally suited to growing arabica coffee the
farmers need no fertilizer or insecticides." However, the people
who actually tend the plants were hit hard by the recent crisis
of coffee prices.
Further, as Miju Adula, chairperson of Ethiopia's Kilenso
Mokonisa Cooperative, puts it, "We used to sell our coffee to
exporters who would cheat us and sometimes they did not pay us
at all." Unfortunately, this isn't uncommon, because coffee
farmers usually lack access to cell phones and computers, so
they cannot locate fair price operations. They must often agree
to low prices before harvest, when they are desperate for any
upfront cash middlemen offer. Many Ethiopian coffee growers
cannot afford to send their children to school, buy medical
supplies or, in some cases, even purchase enough food, reports
Oxfam. In 1999, the Oromia Coffee Farmers Cooperative Union (OCFCU)
was established to link 35 cooperatives, representing 23,000
members. The union returns 70 percent of the profits to the
farmers.
"We worked with Oromia to introduce the first-ever Fair Trade,
organic Ethiopian coffee into the U.S.," says Dean Cycon,
president of Massachussets-based Dean's Beans coffee company.
"When I brought back roasted 'Oromia Blend' to the farmers, they
went wild! Few had ever tasted their own coffee and none had
ever seen it packaged with their name on it," he says. Dean's
Beans now runs a program to help build much-needed wells in
coffee communities, paid for by company sales. In Nicaragua,
Dean's Beans helped set up a cafe roastery, where all profits
fund a charitable prosthetic limb clinic, a godsend in a region
plagued by land mines in addition to poverty.
Clearly, coffee can have a positive impact
on source communities, and according to the Hartman Group, 63
percent of consumers say they will pay a premium for products
that demonstrate a positive environmental impact. But the trick
for busy consumers often becomes sorting out potential marketing
hype from those brands that make a real difference. That's why
certification is such a hot-button issue.
Joseph F. DeRupo of the National Coffee Association says his
group's recent research found that consumer awareness of organic
coffee has jumped from 42 percent in 2003 to 52 percent in 2005
(when a quarter of respondents said that knowledge would
influence their purchase decision). For Fair Trade coffee,
awareness went from seven percent to 15 in the same time, and
for shade-grown coffee it went from 10 to 15 percent.
ORGANIC PLANET
For North Americans, organic coffee may be the most intuitive,
since we've all seen the plethora of organic foods Akin stores
across the continent. Buying organic coffee has less to do with
personal health than, say, reaching for USDA-certified peaches
or chicken cutlets, however, because research suggests your
latte is likely free of chemical residues. Organic certification
is handled country by country, and all foodstuffs sold in the
U.S. can be labeled with the respected USDA seal. Generally,
coffee labeled organic fetches a higher retail price.
"There's still a lot of what we call 'passive organic' coffee
farming in Guatemala and other places, in which the growers are
so poor and so isolated that they continue to work the old way,
without any modern chemicals," says Jeronimo Bollen, the founder
and president of the Guatemala-based farmer-support organization
Manos Campesinos. Bollen says some of these farmers could
benefit from organic certification, and adds, "There are things
they can do to increase their yields, such as learning to use
advanced soil conservation and compost techniques." Bollen says
the easiest way to identify an organic farm is by its tree
cover, because "essentially all organic coffee farms are shade
grown, whereas most non-organic farms aren't." He says the cost
to farmers of getting the certification is about one cent extra
per pound produced.
In one innovative approach, the small Connecticut-based group
Builders Beyond Borders is working with an association of Costa
Rican organic coffee farmers to help increase sustainable
production. Builders Beyond Borders recruits American high
school students to travel to disadvantaged communities, and in
this case young people will be helping build a new facility
where organic coffee farmers will be able to meet, receive
training and support, recruit new growers, display and sell
their products (especially to tourists) and conduct other tasks.
BENEATH THE SHADE
"Once consumers learn the story of how important shade-grown
coffee is, particularly for songbirds, it is an easy and
empowering decision for them to switch to a shade-grown
product," explains Sandy Pinto, director of licensing for the
National Audubon Society. Audubon has been using its substantial
educational muscle to help build support for shade-grown beans,
especially those--such as the society's own branded
offering--that are certified by the Smithsonian Migratory Bird
Center's standards.
"Luckily, in recent years we've been able to find those who
still grow coffee the traditional way, and try to reward them
for their eco-friendly efforts," adds Greg Butcher, Audubon's
director of bird conservation. "This will hopefully keep them
from joining the technified bandwagon."
TRADING FAIR
The international Fair Trade movement is trying to improve the
lives of the world's beleaguered farmers, and in Re case of
coffee this means guaranteeing that producers earn at least a
floor price of $1.26 a pound for their green beans, or $1.41 a
pound if it's organic. Fair Trade premiums are paid only to
cooperatives with democratic governance, many of which date back
to the late 1970s. Buyers must agree to offer credit and
cultivate long-term, stable relationships. Most co-ops reinvest
some of the profits in the community, building wells, schools,
coffee-processing equipment and so on.
Certification is managed by the Fair-trade Labeling
Organizations International, and in the U.S., TransFair USA
places the "Fair Trade Certified" label on cocoa, tea, bananas
and other fruits, although coffee is the biggest seller. This
label is specific to each batch of product, although companies
can widely use the Fair Trade Federation logo if they can be
shown to meet the standards across the board.
According to TransFair spokesperson Haven Bourque, the system
benefits more than 800,000 farmers in 48 countries. She says the
certified coffee sells, for a small price premium, in about
45,000 retailers. Some 32,866,758 pounds of green coffee were
certified in 2004, a 76 percent growth since 2003 (and
representing about 1.8 percent of the global java market). "In
2004, about 68 percent of Fair Trade coffee was also organic,
and many co-ops use the revenue they get from Fair Trade to pay
for organic certification," says Bourque.
In 2002, the progressive hamlet of Berkeley, California made
national headlines with a ballot initiative that would have
required all brewed coffee sold in town to be Fair Trade (or
organic or shade-grown). It didn't pass, but a number of
municipalities in the United Kingdom have since voted to become
"Fair Trade towns," and have agreed to serve only certified
coffee at official meetings and generally promote the
politically correct beans. This summer, New York City and San
Francisco passed resolutions that encourage purchase of Fair
Trade coffee by government agencies.
Like any movement, Fair Trade has had some growing pains, and
some critics have attacked the concept. Some argue that Fair
Trade premiums could lead to an even larger glut of coffee, but
Bourque counters, "That tends not to happen because these are
small plot farmers who won't grow more than they can keep up
with. They just want to stay on their land and farm
traditionally." A 2003 Seattle Times article charged, "The
program doesn't teach farmers how to compete in the global
market, critics say, and the coffee tastes bad." Bourque says a
few early Fair Trade coffees may not have been the best tasting,
but she points to numerous quality and excellence awards since
then. TransFair argues that, far from taking away consumer
freedom, Fair Trade is really about giving consumers information
so they can make their own choices.
One of the biggest complaints of Fair Trade is that the
requirements for eligible farmers are quite restrictive,
specifying that they must be poor land owners organized into
coops. "My farms cannot be Fair Trade certified because we are
too large," says Diego Llach of E1 Salvador, who says he pays
his workers 50 to 110 percent above his country's minimum wage. |
