Tuesday, February 22, 2005

Jim Meyers, President and Founder of Cafe Humana

The current plight of coffee farmers worldwide is pretty ironic. As the producers of the second largest global commodity - second only to petroleum - most coffee is produced by farmers who own 12 acres or less and many are not even covering the cost of production. As oil prices skyrocket and bring windfall profits to multinational corporations, coffee prices have remained at historic lows for nearly a decade, bringing a crisis to farmers worldwide.

"So what can be done", you ask? That's ironic too because, as a nation, we consume over 1/5 of the world's coffee supply. With that level of market influence, we wield amazing power to determine how it is produced and purchased. So, if you enjoy a cup or so of joe each day (even tea drinkers can take similar steps with their tea choices), your switch to "responsible" coffee has a profound impact. There is already a shift beginning in the coffee and tea worlds and now you can join in and make positive global change a reality!

What to Look For

“Responsible” coffee is sustainable coffee - from the coffee bush right to your cup. Every step needs to take no more from the environment than it demands and the sale of this coffee should offer its farmers good pay for good work within a fair and respectable social context. It can be boiled down to a few key elements:

Financial Sustainability or “Fair Trade”
This is the most basic of elements and the most often spoken of. Simply put, this means that farmers are getting paid directly at a price that provides them the opportunity to make a decent living and provide for their families. The open market now brings prices often below that of simply producing the beans and sends many farmers into a cycle of debt and poverty that is often irreversible. Current standards established by the Fair Trade Federation require $1.26 and $1.41/lb (for regular and organic coffee respectively) to be paid directly to the farmer for consideration as “Fair Trade”. By comparison, the current, open commodity market for “washed arabica” coffee has brought as low as $.58 (January '04) per pound - $.32 less than the average cost to produce that pound of coffee in Costa Rica. **

What's more, this is the price paid to the person selling the coffee who, more often than not, is not the farmer but another middleman in the process who extracts a fee from that. In fact, by the time your coffee is poured, much of it has gone from the farmer, to a middleman (processor), then to and exporter, an importer, to a roaster, to the café – with profits rising from pennies to dollars per pound. Café Humana coffee takes the shortest route of any coffee sold today. It begins with the farmer, who processes, roasts and bags the coffee and then it's air freighted for maximum freshness directly to us and then to you. All the extra profits stay directly with the farmers we work with and of course, our profits are all sent right back to help preserve even more rainforest and to help our farmers maintain and expand their sustainable existence!!

Why isn't all fairly-traded coffee Fair Trade certified? Truthfully, most is. However, there is no program of certification at all for origin-roasted coffee so, even though our farmers enjoy prices unheard of to others and benefits among the best in Costa Rica, we do not have the opportunity to be certified despite our best efforts and requests.

All of us involved in Fairly Traded, Organic, and Shade fear that all these words could become as nebulous as “natural” in today's marketplace – essentially a meaningless marketing term. In an effort to pre-empt that degradation of these powerful descriptions of coffee production, the industry is struggling through massive logistics and political red tape in an effort to reach a “super certification” that would consolidate fair trade, shade grown, organic , etc. In the meantime, you are encouraged to ask questions of any coffee supplier making such claims. They should all be quite happy to explain their coffee origins and provide a simple explanation of their position for you to make a choice you are happy with.

Ecological Sustainability – Shade Grown and Organic
Coffee is grown exclusively in the Neo-Tropical areas that stretch around the globe between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. Clear cutting forests, intensive pesticide use and irresponsible processing have decimated these biologically rich areas and it continues at an alarming rate. The impacts are dramatic and felt globally. Shade grown and organic production go hand in hand to produce sustainable and, many would say, a higher quality coffee and here's why…

Coffee grows in the wild under a diverse canopy of shade trees and other plants. In the last 25 years, coffee producing nations were encouraged by multinational organizations (IMF, World Bank) to stimulate their economies by switching to what is referred to as “technified” production. This meant slash and burning millions of acres of rainforest for full-sun exposure and the resultant use of synthetic pesticides and fertilizers. These would take the place of the existing harmony inherent in the biological systems that had evolved around the wild coffee plant. New hybrids were produced to handle this unnatural method of production and the yield per plant was greater than ever. Great, right? Wrong.

Tainted water supplies, chemical-related health problems for farmers and their families, and the deep and lasting implications of deforestation are but a few of the reasons that this is not a sustainable method of production for the long term.

Shade Grown coffee not only eliminates the need for clear-cutting but demand for it will actually help to reforest areas and slow the cutting of additional areas. It also reintroduces biological controls that keep pests in check, restores habitat and, when planted with forethought, provides natural fertilizer, compost and secondary food crops to the coffee farmers for sustenance and financial stability.

Quality
Nothing is more important than emphasizing the importance of quality coffee to the coffee farmers for their own survival. An organic, fairly traded coffee will simply not support a higher price if it tastes horrendous! Insulated from the wild price swings of the commodity market that all average coffee is generically placed in, superior quality beans are creating a niche of their own – the specialty coffee industry. What's more, developing pride in the quality product produced by individual farmers is a priceless commodity with positive social impacts are hard to measure and impossible to replace.

The rising market for “Single Origin” coffee is a direct reflection of this new emphasis. These unblended coffees represent the best of a specific geographic area and just recently are actually beginning to be branded by the actual farm they came from. In fact, recent auctions have brought up to $22/pound to exclusive and limited productions from specific farms! So, if you've been buying the same old coffee for while, try something new next time! There is a lot of ‘undiscovered' coffee out there just waiting to be appreciated!

Of course this is just a cursory look at what is certainly a deep and complex topic. (“Google “coffee crisis” and you'll get over 10,000 hits!) However, taking even a basic understanding of the above information with you as you go about your periodic coffee purchases will change the way coffee is produced. In some countries, organic production is nearly outpacing demand. It is up to all of us to provide the market and reward for sustainable production because we all will benefit in the end.

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**As of February 2005, world market prices for coffee have begun to see positive effects of a sharp decrease in global production levels - largely from bankrupt farmers and those who have given up on their coffee for other atepts to make ends meet ($.89/lb - still $.01 below production costs in Costa Rica). However, this fluxuation is only representative of the historical ebb and flow in what has always been, and remains, a very volatile and unstable market for farmers. Typically, good prices are followed by rapidly increased production by those seeking to take advantage of the good prices, a glut in production once more and finally another market crash or slump. There is much work to be done!