Drinking Coffee Can Build Communities, but Only with a Fair Trade

The "Fair Trade" label is a reassuring beacon that a purchase is part of something bigger than itself. With between 50 and 70% of the world's coffee grown by small family farmers, they are often subject to a loss of profit in a long chain of middlemen, exporters, brokers, importers, roasters, distributors and retailers. This conventional trade route from bean to cup is feed extensively by crop grown on large estates and coffee plantations that make up the remaining percentage of coffee farmers. The estates often employee migrant workers at poverty level wages as owners hoard the already small profits.

When an indigenous people can maintain a small family farm they traditionally held no control of the bean once an industrialized processing mill buys the crop. The farmers got only 2% - 4% of the final retail price that as www.transfairusa.org indicates, "Trap farmers in a cycle of poverty and debt." The family farmers traditionally lacked transportation and agro-technology relying on often corrupt Middlemen and Exporters reinforcing this cycle and forcing estates to pay workers less. Farmers' children often left school early to work to make ends meet. Cut short of fundamental literacy and mathematics it became an uneducated struggle to manage a family business.

Paid only $0.25 per pound, it takes 4,000 beans handpicked by farmers to make one pound of coffee. "Coyotes", as middlemen are known in Latin America, paid the farmers less than what the beans cost to grow. This is where Fair Trade comes in, eliminating the middleman and exporters, making certified importers guarantee to pay at least $1.26 per pound. Fair Trade importers put the money consumers pay for coffee directly into the hands of the farmers.