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Unless your morning latte was
a fair trade blend, it probably cost more than what
the farmer who picked the beans earns in a day.
Conventional coffee prices are
at their lowest in a century, even below the cost
of production. Farmers have been leaving the fruit
to rot on the tree, pulling the kids out of school,
abandoning the family land and pouring into the cities
to find non-existent work. That’s why, as the
most heavily traded commodity after oil, and the most
common beverage after water, coffee is a major focus
of the fair trade movement.
If your morning latte was a fair trade brew,
it means the person who farmed the beans is earning enough to support
his family. This is all well and good, but the way fair trade is usually
explained — with prices, numbers and statistics — ignores
it’s lasting benefits. The true point of fair trade is the cultural,
communal, and environmental stability it bolsters.
A farmer who sells through fair trade is a member
of a cooperative that is a vehicle for community empowerment. And not
just a neighborhood watch: The people typically organized via fair trade
are those whom the free market has filtered to the lowest economic stratum.
Rather than maneuvering them into a position where they’re forced
to take what they can get, fair trade recognizes farmers as equal partners,
a platform from which they can command more control over their business
and lives.
“Fair trade is a different kind of business
relationship between the producer and buyer, which has been an inspiration
to help these communities pull together instead of caving to the pressure
of all the things trying to blow them apart,” says Monika Firl.
Monika heads up producer relations for Cooperative Coffees, and as such,
led half a dozen coffee roasters and me (as a grateful representative
of Idyll Development Foundation, one of Cooperative Coffee’s funders)
on a buying trip to farmers’ co-ops in Nicaragua, Guatemala, and
Mexico in February, where we were able to see the effect for ourselves.
Through Cooperative Coffees, 15 North American
roasters combine their resources to purchase beans from small farmers
who combine their harvests to sell in bulk. Much of the business is
taken care of personally at annual meetings between the co-ops. In this
way, Cooperative Coffees and other fair trade organizations build long-term
relationships with farmers that both parties can depend on. Support
for organic certification, sustainable farming practices, access to
affordable credit, and consumer education to create more demand for
fairly traded coffee are also priorities of the fair trade movement.
Mut Vitz, centered just east of San Cristobal
de las Casas in Chiapas, Mexico, is an astonishing model of a farmers’
co-op. Its list of 560 members can be cross-referenced with that of
the Zapatista movement for cultural survival and self-determination
of indigenous peoples in Chiapas. Most Mut Vitz farmers are living on
their father’s father’s father’s land, which they
intend to keep. This, not the price of coffee, is the root cause for
their organization. But coffee helps keep them going.
Democratically run by volunteers, Mut Vitz unites
the livelihood of 22 indigenous villages, with a reach beyond the coffee
fields. Fair trade income leveraged by the co-op helps pay for a community
health clinic and autonomous, bilingual (Spanish/Tzotzil) schools. Mut
Vitz’s model motivated women in the communities to form weaving,
gardening, and bread-baking co-ops, which have built shared ovens and
community gardens. These supply the villages with fresh bread and organic
vegetables, and earn the co-op a little extra income.
In contrast to the growth of Mut Vitz’s
fair trade sales (from 20 tons to 200 tons in three years), Maya Vinic
in Chenalho, Chiapas is just getting started. Like Mut Vitz, Maya Vinic
has strong roots in a movement for indigenous rights, but their group,
Las Abejas, are conscientious objectors to the armed civil war. In 1997,
45 members of Las Abejas, mostly women and children, were murdered in
a prolonged attack by paramilitaries while praying for peace in Acteal,
a Chenalho refugee community. “The timing of the massacre was
obviously planned to coincide with the coffee harvest,” says Monika,
“and many people benefited, both economically and politically,
at the cost of the Abejas members who were too terrified to harvest
their coffee that year.” The fear was augmented by the fact that
the murderers were neighbors of Las Abejas families. In the wake of
the massacre, then, “Las Abejas decided to turn inwards and create
a new organization comprised of their own members in an attempt to channel
their products toward better markets.”
In 2003, Acteal is breathtakingly unified through
the lens of the Maya Vinic Cooperative. Six-hundred thirty-two farmers
have an interest in the co-op. During introductions between Maya Vinic
and Cooperative Coffees, each question posed by a roaster was directly
answered by a different farmer depending on his knowledge, without being
prompted by a leader. A perfect day of growers and roasters tromping
together through fields exploding with bright coffee cherries (it helps
that they’ve been organic for ten years) led to the signing of
a contract for Maya Vinic’s first 10 tons of fair trade coffee.
A throng of people in the village of Yaxgemel, one of Maya Vinic’s
33 communities, turned out to attentively witness every translated word
and watch every stroke of the pen. We all quivered with excitement.
This solidarity and stability to plan for the
future is the end to which fair trade is a means. Price does play a
crucial part in fair trade, but it is only one method. “We’re
trying to pay decent wages that don’t cause compromises to have
to creep into the system,” says Bill Harris, President of Cooperative
Coffees. “We’re trying to do something that gives people
options of maintaining their cultural identity if they want to. The
main thing we do is allow people to do what they’ve always done
and to make a living doing it.”
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