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2004-05-04 issue:

A cup of justice

By buying fair-trade coffee, Mennonite congregations can help poor coffee growers earn a living wage.

by Duane Stoltzfus

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By the time the Sunday morning fellowship coffee is brewed in Mennonite churches across the country, Jose Antonio Garcia Mendoza is several hours into a day of harvesting beans at a coffee cooperative in the western mountains of El Salvador.

Seven mornings a week he rises before dawn, eats a breakfast of corn tortillas and beans and begins to walk the rutted dirt road from his home in Tacuba to the coffee cooperative, Las Colinas. An hour later he is ready to join the harvest crew.

There, on the steep hillsides accessible by narrow foot paths, dozens of men and women pick the red fruit known as cherries from branches of coffee plants. The cherries, each of which contains two beans, are dropped into baskets, then poured into sacks holding 100 pounds or more, sacks that are slung over backs and carried to waiting trucks along the road.
This is the stretch of the coffee chain in which the work is hard, very hard—or, as Garcia Mendoza says, “muy duro.”

Back at the processing plant in Las Colinas, the beans are removed from the fleshy red outer covering, fermented, washed and laid out on terraces to dry. The beans will be trucked to port, shipped to New York City and roasted at a plant near Boston.

In this way, the beans plucked by Garcia Mendoza will come to bear the Equal Exchange label “Fellowship Blend,” a percolator coffee popular in churches, or maybe the label “Café Salvador,” found in homes across North America.

Cheap instant coffee: It’s doubtful Garcia Mendoza himself will ever taste the “Fellowship Blend” or “Café Salvador.” Given the depressed prices on the world coffee market, he is lucky to be able to afford to serve a visitor cheap instant coffee, watered down and heavily sweetened. At home, a coffee grower lowers his expectations.

World market prices for coffee, among the most heavily traded of commodities, dropped from a high of $2.50 per pound in 1997 to a low of 45 cents in 2001. As of mid-February, the market rate was 75 cents per pound.

“Fair-trade” coffee operates outside the usual channels of payment and distribution. Fair-trade companies such as Equal Exchange are committed to building direct, long-term partnerships with coffee growers and to paying what is termed a living wage.

A company that wants to carry the fair-trade label must meet several certification conditions set by TransFair USA of Oakland, Calif., including a commitment to pay at least $1.26 per pound for conventionally grown beans and $1.41 per pound for organic coffee.

Equal Exchange, a worker-owned organization founded in 1986, ranks as the largest supplier of fair-trade coffee, with about 30 percent of that market. Equal Exchange buys directly from small farmers in El Salvador and elsewhere, many of whom were one-time landless peasants who received parcels through agrarian reform.

As a percentage of the overall coffee market, fair trade remains a modest enterprise: about 10 million pounds of the 2.8 billion pounds imported, or one-third of 1 percent, according to Equal Exchange. But the fair-trade volume has nearly doubled each year: in 1999, 2 million pounds; in 2000, 4 million pounds; in 2001, 6.5 million; in 2002, 10 million.

One of Equal Exchange’s partners in the fair-trade coffee endeavor is Mennonite Central Committee (MCC), which last July began officially promoting what it calls “a cup of justice.”
Through the MCC U.S. Coffee Project, cosponsored by Ten Thousand Villages and MMA, Mennonite and Brethren in Christ churches are encouraged to purchase and serve fair-trade coffee, whether for fellowship time on Sundays or for breakfast in the homes of church members during the week.

As of January, 81 Mennonite and Brethren in Christ congregations and groups had signed up with MCC’s U.S. Coffee Project, agreeing to serve fair-trade coffee.

Pennsylvania led all states with the highest number of participating churches and organizations, 15, followed by Indiana with 14; Virginia, 9; New York and Ohio, 6; and Kansas and Illinois, 5.

Congregations can purchase fair-trade coffee at Ten Thousand Villages stores or directly from Equal Exchange at wholesale prices.

Martin Shupack, legislative associate for international affairs in the MCC U.S. Washington Office, says some congregations may be purchasing fair-trade coffee through other suppliers and so have not yet been counted—indeed some congregations may not even know that MCC is keeping a list.

Fellowship hour coffee: That would be true for College Mennonite Church in Goshen, Ind., which began serving fair-trade coffee in the fall of 2002. The church purchases its fellowship hour coffee from Level Ground Trading in British Columbia.

“If you purchase fair-trade coffee, please let us know,” Martin says. Churches who are added to the MCC list (posted on the agency’s Web site at www.mcc.org/us/washington/coffee/) will receive a packet of information on fair-trade coffee as well as periodic updates via email. The list is also the best measure, he says, of churchwide contribution.

“Congregations can directly help coffee farmers by buying fair-trade coffee,” Martin says. “It’s also a hands-on way of learning about trade issues and injustices, and lays the groundwork for doing policy advocacy.

“Fair trade can only go so far,” he says. “It probably can’t help 25 million coffee farmers in the world; the market for fair trade is not that large. But it can be a way for congregations to learn about the farmers’ plight, to help some farmers and to advocate for change.”

Interfaith coffee: Mennonites are not alone in drinking fair-trade coffee. Through its interfaith coffee program, Equal Exchange struck its first denominational partnership in 1997, with Lutheran World Relief. Since then, partnerships have been added with the American Friends Service Committee, Brethren Witness, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee and the United Methodist Committee on Relief. Last fall Catholic Relief Services signed on as well. The United Church of Christ was scheduled to join the interfaith network in March.

Some 8,424 congregations and faith organizations nationwide purchased 320,024 pounds of fair-trade coffee from Equal Exchange in 2003, about 20 percent of Equal Exchange’s total sales.

Lutherans led the way with 3,676 participating congregations and 147,702 pounds purchased, followed by Presbyterians with 1,554 congregations and 82,897 pounds. The Methodists ranked third in the number of congregations involved (724), but Unitarians (502 congregations) drank more coffee (41,838 pounds) than the Methodists (31,970 pounds).

“We see a huge potential for the interfaith program,” said Anna Utech, coordinator of Equal Exchange’s interfaith coffee program. “People of faith are looking for ways to live out their faith in their daily lives, and by an act as simple as purchasing fair-trade coffee they can participate in creating a more just global economy.”

In January, a group of faculty members and students from Goshen College participated in an Equal Exchange interfaith delegation to El Salvador. Together with Presbyterian and Methodist church members, the Goshen group visited several coffee cooperatives, including Las Colinas.

 When the delegation arrived at Las Colinas, the coffee growers gathered in a social hall to welcome the guests and introduce themselves. Julio Asenso Garcia, one of the workers, rose to speak:

“I want you to feel like we are all part of one family, the family united in Christ. … And I want to thank God for having brought us together so that you all can go to the United States and sell our product, which is very important, because there are many other cooperatives just like us that also need to have their product sold. And if we don’t sell our products [to you], we are forced to sell them for the very low prices that are being given on the market today and will never be able to get out of debt.

“I pray that God will move the hearts of the rich, the ones that he decided to make rich and so that they would understand our plight. Thanks to God, we have the privilege of being poor. And we are poor, but with a lot of faith, huge faith in God. He has made all the earth, all the land and all the sea and the sky. And someday we will perhaps be together. Right now maybe we cannot walk together side by side, but perhaps someday we will walk together side by side in heaven.”

Duane Stoltzfus teaches journalism and communication at Goshen (Ind.) College.

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