November 25, 2002
Wake up and smell the coffee growers' plight
___By Leslie Scanlon
___Religion News Service
___LOUISVILLE, Ky. (RNS) --For many Americans, the ritual of sitting down with a cup of coffee in the morning is as much a part of their routine as taking a shower or brushing their teeth.
___But Porfirio Zepeda Arana sees the other side. He works for a coffee-growing cooperative in Nicaragua and lives in a house with no electricity. When the price of coffee drops too low, when the farmers can barely sell their coffee for more than it costs to grow the beans, when farmers have to leave their land because they can't afford to stay, he sees the morning brew coming out of people's lives.
___Some face the dangers at the U.S. border, trying to cross illegally, desperate to find work.
___"There are kids who end up in the street, homeless," Arana said, speaking through a translator recently at the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) national offices in Louisville. "There are a lot of folks who are dying of hunger. In reality, it is the children who are really affected by it. There are a lot of children who are dying of hunger because they don't have anything to eat."
___Arana and Elim Isabel Blandon, a coffee grower and mother of three, are traveling in the United States on a trip sponsored by Equal Exchange, a Massachusetts-based company that tries to educate North Americans about the economic crisis in the coffee trade and to encourage them to buy what they call "fair trade" coffee--organically grown, high-quality coffee that's sold through cooperatives of small farmers, at above-market prices which guarantees those farmers a living wage.
___Some U.S. congregations--hoping to bring the realities of global economic development down to a personal level--are trying to do something to help the small coffee farmers by pledging they will use only fair-trade coffee at church suppers and fellowship hours and by encouraging members to buy fair-trade coffee for use in their own homes.
___Equal Exchange, a for-profit firm founded in 1986, negotiates directly with cooperatives of farmers who grow coffee and provides those farmers both access to credit and a guaranteed, per-pound price for their coffee that's usually two to three times what they could get on the world market, where the farmers' profits are sometimes gutted by middlemen called "coyotes" and where prices have plunged 70 percent in the last five years.
___The world coffee price typically varies between 40 cents to 60 cents per pound; Equal Exchange guarantees the farmers will be paid $1.26 a pound.
___So far, Equal Exchange's Interfaith Coffee Program has partnerships with a half-dozen denominations and works with about 10 percent of the churches in each of those denominations.
___More than 5,100 religious congregations and organizations have participated by ordering fair-trade coffee, tea or cocoa. Last year, Equal Exchange sold 60 tons of coffee through those partnerships and paid the cooperatives $960,000 in above-market premiums, according to Jill Wenke of Equal Exchange.
___This is a project that reaches across political lines because both liberal and conservative congregations have participated in the coffee project, Wenke said. "It's a very easy step a congregation can take to help people in need."
___When congregations talk about why they support fair-trade coffee, she said, they often cite Jesus' teachings to care for the poor, for "the least of these," and Micah 6:8, in which God exhorts the people to do justice, to love kindness, to walk humbly with God.
___So Wenke and the Nicaraguan farmers have been barnstorming in the United States--traveling with the "Solar Expresso" van, in which they can brew coffee on the spot using solar panels. For Arana and Blandon, it's a chance to make Americans--many of whom don't blink at spending $3 or $4 a cup for coffee drinks at the local java shop--understand what the economics of the coffee trade means for real lives and the impact Americans can have if they encourage their congregations, the restaurants and coffee shops they patronize, and their families to buy fair-trade.
___Blandon farms in the Miraflor region of Nicaragua, about 185 kilometers north of Managua, a region of about 4,500 people. Her whole family is involved in farming. "I've been living there since I was born," she said with a shy smile, her long curly hair pulled back in a clasp, "and I expect to die there."
___Blandon is a Protestant evangelical in an area that's about 70 percent Roman Catholic. But religion is not a dividing force in her village, she said.
___In the Miraflor region, four of every five farmers participates in Equal Exchange and some of the additional income the program generates is used to support educational, health and other programs for the entire community. The additional income and the credit that's available through Equal Exchange is allowing farmers to diversify their crops--growing bananas, avocados and oranges as well, which preserves the richness of the soil and gives farming families more products to eat and to sell.
___After Hurricane Mitch devastated coffee fields in Nicaragua in 1998, a group of women was able to obtain a plot of land to farm. Eight of them are working together to grow coffee on the land--including a single mother in her 30s with seven daughters. The women harvested their first coffee crop last year and are selling it through Equal Exchange.
___"They feel hopeful, but they see commerce as something fragile," Arana said. "Because they know that, that will be what will put food on the table."
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