FEATURE - US urged to wake up to "coffee with a conscience"
Date: 15-Oct-02
Country: USA
Author: Ros Davidson
The "Fair Trade" movement, which seeks to pay Third World coffee growers enough to adequately feed and educate their families, is gaining momentum - promoted by non-profit groups and a new advertising campaign featuring an actor of presidential calibre, Martin Sheen of the White House television drama "West Wing".
For supporters of fair trade coffee, the idea is simple. With plunging coffee prices bringing some coffee farmers to the brink of starvation, they are asking U.S. consumers to pay more for cappuccinos to help protect rural agricultural workers from wild swings in commodity markets.
But critics of the movement say it does little to help coffee workers on large plantations that are not eligible for fair trade guidelines.
Launched in Europe in the 1980s, the fair trade movement has found one of its strongest U.S. bases of support in the liberal California town of Berkeley - a university community known for its outspoken support of progressive causes.
In November, Berkeley voters will be among the first in the United States to decide whether all brewed coffee sold in the city must be certified as "fair trade".
To be certified, importers agree to pay coffee growers a minimum of $1.26 a pound (454 grams). The coffee must also be grown according to specific social and environmental standards. If the beans are organic, the required price would be 15 cents per pound higher.
In most cases, the "fair trade" brew costs consumers only a few cents more per cup - small change in a world where a regular cup of Starbucks coffee costs $1.75.
Overall, world coffee prices are hovering around 55 cents a pound, up from historic lows near 45 cents a pound set in October 2001, but still far below the 70 to 80 cents it costs to produce a pound of coffee. The price is unlikely to go up very much because there is an world over supply of about 15 percent.
U.S. consumers pay anywhere from $4 to $9 per pound of coffee at their supermarkets, depending on the grade.
SUFFERING IN CENTRAL AMERICA
The fair trade guidelines, which are being promoted by an Oakland, California-based non-profit group called TransFair, are designed to squeeze more cash out of America's coffee drinkers to spend on improved coffee production and local services such as schools in the developing world's coffee-producing areas.
The initiative is coming too late for many in Central America. For a second straight year, regional coffee workers and their families are starving as plummeting world prices for the crop shut down farms and reduce unemployed farmers to begging.
Over supply in world coffee markets has driven prices so low that many plantation owners in the region cannot afford to pick their crops or are going broke. Across Central America and in southern Mexico, half a million coffee workers are estimated to have lost their jobs.
Nowhere has the crisis been more evident than in Nicaragua, Latin America's poorest country after Haiti. As of early September, at least 14 people were known to have died of hunger and malnutrition in Nicaragua's northern coffee-growing region. The situation has not changed since then, with coffee workers lining roadsides near the capital asking for handouts.
FAIR TRADE - GOOD TO THE LAST DROP
"Fair Trade gives farmers a price that allows them to cover the costs of production, to send their children to school, keep a roof over their heads and - most importantly - to put food in their stomachs," said Liam Brody, a spokesman for Oxfam America, part of the charity Oxfam International which supports the fair trade push.
Farmers earn about two to three times more if beans are certified as fair trade, in part because the coffee is grown by cooperatives or family farms and sold directly to importers, according to fair trade proponents.
But TransFair only certifies farms that are 25 acres (10 hectares) or less - a boon for small producers, who produce 70 percent of the world's coffee in terms of
