When you wake up and smell the coffee, you’ll agree the world coffee market stinks. The welfare of hundreds of thousands of coffee farmers around the world is pegged to a market system irrelevant to their lives, responsive instead to predictions of frost in Brazil, and the whims of NY and London commodities speculators. As a result, farmers are getting about 40 cents a pound for their coffee — the lowest price ever, and far less than it costs to grow and process the crop. From Sumatra to San Cristobal, farm families are losing their land and fleeing to overcrowded cities.

The Fair Trade movement offers a reasonable alternative to the poverty of the current market. In a nutshell, Fair Trade provides a livable floor price when the market price paid to farmers, along with their quality premiums, sinks below $1.26. Equally as important, Fair Traders agree to provide pre-financing to the farmers. This up-front money allows the farmers to pay for harvesting and processing of their crop without over reliance on local moneylenders or unpredictable banks. In order to participate, farmers must be organized into transparent, democratically-run cooperatives. 

For importers and roasters, it costs a lot more money to be committed to Fair Trade, but recent trips to Nicaragua and Ethiopia demonstrated the impact of that commitment on the lives of farmers, and reminded me where my values lay.

In January, the whole Dean’s Beans crew headed south to the mountains of Esteli, Nicaragua, to meet with our southern partners in PRODECOOP, one of the most successful Fair Trade cooperatives in the world. It’s hard for northern eyes to see, but the quality of life for PRODECOOP’s Fair Trade farmers is significantly higher than that of their farm neighbors in Esteli. Better housing, more pick-up trucks, schoolbooks and shoes, vegetables and variety on the table, and a profound sense of dignity and control. By our standards it’s still the poverty of the farm, but it’s light years from where it had been and where it would be without Fair Trade. Two years ago, the farmers voted to pool their Fair Trade premiums to buy and rebuild an abandoned beneficio, or processing plant. Today, the beneficio is processing all of PRODECOOP’s production, so the farmers keep an even greater share of the market price.

In February, I went to Ethiopia, the fourth poorest country in the world and the birthplace of coffee. Unlike Nicaragua, Ethiopia is new to Fair Trade.  We hiked through deep, forest canopied coffee regions, alive with monkeys, hippos and hornbills. Many of the OROMIA Cooperative farmers had walked hours out of the mountains to meet us at their cement and mud offices in Yrgacheffe. We were taken through the coop’s accounting with a transparency and thoroughness that would make Enron shudder. The coop elders spoke with pride of their communities and their land. They also spoke of the harshness of life, the lack of water, health care or schooling. There was no coffee from the early harvest, because the banks were months behind in disbursing loans, so there had been no money to pay for processing. The coffee berries had been sold to local middlemen for pennies a pound. But now it would be different, as our Fair Trade pre-financing gave them the up-front cash to process the current harvest. And the Fair Trade price they would receive would be three times the current market price! In each coop we visited, the farmers told us that Fair Trade was the difference between hunger and survival.

Fair trade is not the solution to poverty in the coffee world. Nor should it be a marketing gimmick by companies that carry one or two Fair Trade coffees while reaping huge profits on all their low-cost beans. In today’s market the Fair Trade commitments we make to the farmers through livable prices and access to credit are essential to keeping the farm communities on the land, feeding their families, and providing us with great coffee at home.

You can purchase Dean's Beans Organic Coffee online at Shop Western Mass - http://shopwma.com/deans/

Dean Cycon is the owner of Dean’s Beans Organic Coffee in Orange, MA and co-chairman of Cooperative Coffees, a Fair Trade roasters cooperative. 

Another Great link for all things Fair Trade is TransFair USA found at http://www.transfairusa.org 

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