Juan Valdez he is not. Referred to as "Don Napo" by his companions, Napolean García has been a member of the Las Colinas Coffee Cooperative ever since the army came in and threw the former landlord off the land, giving the land to the farmworkers. That was in 1980, in an unsuccessful effort by the Salvadoran government to appease the poor and head off the civil war that was heating up in the country.
Twenty-one years later, Don Napo and the other 99 members of the cooperative are doing better than most coffee farmers. While current coffee prices worldwide give the farmers only about 30 cents per pound, the Las Colinas Co-op members are getting $1.26 per pound on the fair trade market for part of their crop. The Cooperative's president, Rene Santos, says: "By selling a portion of our crop to the fair-trade market, we have been able to pay off our debts, eat well, and continue working at a time when other coffee farmers around us are going bankrupt." Because of the premium price they receive, he says, "all of our children have been able to continue with their schooling, which is really important to our families."
In addition to these benefits, the co-op members also used a group fund built up through fair-trade coffee sales to improve the local soccer field for the community that surrounds them. How does the fair-trade market work to benefit these small farmers?
The fair-trade market consists of buyers and sellers who have agreed to certain criteria for producing, selling, and marketing their products. In exchange for fulfilling these criteria, the producers get a higher price for their crop and the wholesale buyers get a "Fair Trade Certified" label placed on the final product they sell to consumers. This label attracts consumers who are concerned about fairness in the marketplace, assuring them about the terms of trade involved in getting that product to the supermarket shelf. Individual coffee drinkers get the satisfaction of knowing that the money they paid for that cup or bag of coffee resulted in a fairer recompense for the farmer than the regular market provides.
Fair-trade Labeling Organizations International (FLO) supervises the fulfillment of the criteria by producers and wholesale buyers alike. An international coalition of fair-trade labeling initiatives, FLO spans the globe with labels bearing different names, representing different national initiatives, but attesting to the same criteria and monitoring system worldwide. In the United States, Transfair USA manages the FLO label and criteria.
As a producer for the fair-trade market, the Las Colinas Co-op must, by nature, be an organized group of small-scale producers who own and work their land and are not dependent upon hired labor in a major way. They must also agree not to practice sex discrimination in accepting members and not to pollute groundwater in coffee-washing processes. Business must be conducted in an open, participatory manner, and accepted accounting methods must be used and verified by the monitors. This reduces the risk of fraud or of control of the group by a few individuals for their own benefit. In addition, participation in FLO certification requires producer organizations to set aside $5.00 for every 100 pounds of coffee sold. The fund created is used for collective projects such as community improvements, emergency medical expenses of members, or improvement in the coffee farms.
The Las Colinas Co-op sells part of its crop to Equal Exchange, only one of various US coffee companies carrying the Transfair Label. As an authorized user of one of the FLO labels, a company must:
While only a small portion of the coffee sold by participating coffee companies carries the "Fair Trade Certified" label and comes from places like the Las Colinas Co-op, fairly traded coffee makes a tremendous difference in the lives of thousands of small, poor communities worldwide. It provides more secure employment and conserves natural resources. The more that consumers demand "Fair Trade Certified" coffee on the shelves where they shop, the greater the market share for fairly produced coffee and the higher the incomes of producers and buyers who play fair.
Don Napo and his colleagues in the Las Colinas Cooperative are a lot better off than Rosa Aminta Vasquez, age 50, and her daughter, Morena, age 32. They are daily-wage laborers on a traditional coffee plantation owned by a wealthy family in El Salvador. Instead of steady, year-round work on land they own and are improving, Rosa and her daughter have regular work as coffee pickers only from November until around the end of January. They are paid according to the quantity of beans they pick, which on a good day averages out to about $4.00. Morena observes: "This isn't even enough to feed our family for a day. But if we complain, we are fired."
They get no benefits to supplement their low pay. There is not even food or water provided. Instead, they have to carry their rations with them on the hour-and-a-half hike up the side of the San Salvador volcano to reach the precious high-altitude coffee beans. They generally bring Morena's children with them so that the oldest two (boys, age 15 and 17) can work and the others can be watched. The whole work day, including the walk up and down the volcano, occupies 12 hours.
In addition to the hard, physical labor, day laborers in the coffee fields risk having the coffee they have picked stolen from them, thereby lowering their daily earnings. Rosa says: "If our coffee isn't robbed in the field by another worker, then it is robbed at the scales. When we turn in the coffee to get paid, we can see that the scale says 60 pounds, but it is written down as only 40 or 50 pounds. The owner's boss will just say whatever he wants to, and, if we protest, they won't hire us back the next day!"
Large coffee growers are notorious for having dismal working conditions in their fields. Last year, the Guatemalan nonprofit organization called Commission for the Verification of Codes of Conduct (COVERCO) did a comprehensive study of labor conditions on large coffee plantations in Guatemala. Six hundred workers in three different areas of the country were interviewed. Of these, 80 percent were not paid overtime, and nearly 60 percent were denied the legally mandated benefits of Social Security and access to national health care. Conditions such as these—also confirmed by Guatemalan labor unions in legal action within Guatemala—resulted in the US government's decision in October 2000 to deny Guatemala GSP trade benefits. The GSP (Generalized System of Preferences) duty-free trade program grants trade benefits only to countries that meet certain standards.
In the regular "free" trade market, where prices for coffee and other foods are set by speculation on futures exchanges and boards of trade, God's people and creation suffer. When world coffee prices drop, wages to farmers and coffee pickers in the regular market go down, but coffee prices in stores around the world do not.
In the regular coffee market, care for the environment is not a priority either. Water used to wash the husks off coffee beans is dumped into local streams, thereby contaminating the water. On large plantations, trees are cut down and lots of chemicals are used to grow the bushes faster and fuller. The resulting erosion and chemical runoff harms the environment and the people living nearby.
Numerous studies show that small farmers growing coffee in the traditional way—mixed into tropical forests under ample shade—not only produce the best-tasting coffee but also do little harm to the environment. Such small farms tend to be family-owned and operated or in the possession of cooperatives such as Las Colinas, formed during programs of agrarian reform.
Improving conditions on large plantations and supporting more sales from small farms that are "Fair Trade Certified" is a major priority of the fair-trade movement today. If more consumer demand existed for "Fair Trade Certified" coffee, there would be more market incentives for coffee to be purchased from places like the Las Colinas Cooperative and for large plantations to improve working and environmental conditions.
In the United States, the "Fair Trade Certified" label appears only on coffee and only in some regions of the country. But in Europe, several FLO labels can be found on orange juice, chocolate, and bananas. Approximately 5 percent of food shoppers in some European countries look for these labels in their supermarkets, making fair trade a serious market trend. In the United States, the percentage is much lower. The fair-trade movement worldwide is now looking to US buyers to increase the amount of fairly traded products purchased. But awareness on this issue is much lower in the United States than in Europe.
As Christians, our choice is clear and our task is at hand. In Mark 4:30-32, Jesus said that the kingdom of God "is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs..." Fairly traded goods may be only a small seed in the economy now. But if we make a faithful response to these promising fair-trade initiatives, fair trade can become a large plant, just as the mustard tree is. In this way, we can all help to build God's kingdom, one cup of coffee at a time.
Text and photographs copyright 2001 by New World Outlook: The Mission Magazine of The United Methodist Church. Used by Permission. For reprint permission, contact New World Outlook by E-mail at nwo@gbgm-umc.org.