Fair Trade Coffee & Conflict-Free Electronics?
By: Kirk Lyman-Barner
Special Guest Contributer
I’m a big fan of a good cup of coffee. And since moving to Americus, a “good” cup of coffee has come to mean more than just the way it smells as it begins brewing at 6:30 in the morning, more than the way it tastes or the revival it provides on a long afternoon. The folks at Café Campesino and Cooperative Coffees are good friends of mine and they’ve taken great care to educate me about what goes into that little one-pound bag of coffee I buy each week without even batting an eye. I now know exactly what goes into that bag of beans – and the role fair trade plays in it. Small farmers who were once exploited by large multi-national corporations have, through fair trade organizations, the capacity to produce coffee at a legitimate profit for themselves and their families. That is what makes a cup of coffee “good.”
I recently traveled to the Democratic Republic of the Congo where I learned of another form of labor exploitation and I immediately saw the connection between folks like the coffee farmers and the suffering Congolese. So grab a cup of some “good” coffee and let me tell you about it. Read more…
Just for Pun
Tarred of bland coffee? Pining away for a fresh, bold cup of joe? I don’t think I’m barking up the wrong tree when I say that I think Cafe Campesino fair trade, organic, shade grown coffee will resin-ate with your taste buds. Pardon the sappy puns. It’s simply an attempt to needle you into trying our coffee. Plus, Cafe Campesino – an evergreen company, is giving away loblolly pines at its Americus roastery. Come get a cup of joe, and take a tree with you! Treeeet yourself and your sappy neighbor to a few saplings on us. Cafe Campesino – rooted in this community and in your yard.
Customer Spotlight – The King Center
Café Campesino is pleased to welcome The Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change as a new customer! Dedicated to advancing the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., this Atlanta-based entity works to educate visitors about Dr. King’s life and teachings. Most recently, the King Center has partnered with JPMorgan Chase & Co. to digitize more than 1 million documents written by Dr. King and other key figures of the Civil Rights Movement. Visitors to the King Center can explore the imaging project through touch-screen technology. Then, they can head to the King Center Bookstore and pick up a bag of Café Campesino’s King Center Blend. Learn more at: www.thekingcenter.org
Newsletter Coffee Special
Enjoy 10% off our Bolivian French Roast coffee when you order online. Enter code: “bolivia12” to redeem your discount. Discount good until Friday, January 27, 2012 and cannot combined with other discounts.
Extra Special
Do you consider yourself a competitive athlete? Then, try Dirty Spokes Productions’ 8.0 mile trail run on February 4! The course will go through Watkinsville’s scenic Heritage Park. Get 5$ off your mail-in entry fee by writing “Café Campesino” on your order form and returning it by Monday, Jan. 30th. OR- Tell us why you want to run this race on Facebook and be eligible to win a free entry! We’ll choose a winner on Friday, Jan. 20. http://www.dirtyspokes.com/tr_races.php?trraceid=3&trpageid=1
Fair Trade Certified Makin’ the News
The politics of Fair Trade certification have hit the news. Have you been keeping up? A few links that are worth checking out: Dan Jaffee and Philip Howard’s “Visualizing Fair Trade” project (not a news article but very timely graphs that compare companies’ commitments to sourcing Fair Trade Certified coffee). Other full-length articles addressing the Fair Trade Certified debate have recently appeared in The New York Times, Mother Jones and Grist. National Public Radio covered the story both on radio and on their food blog, The Salt. Read up. Let us know your thoughts. Read our Nov. 18 post or the statement from our co-op (Cooperative Coffees) to know ours!
SOA Watch: Why We’re Committed
SOA Watch: Why We’re Committed
By: Bill Harris
In 1998, Cafe Campesino began as a small trading company grounded in a simple concept: by trading in an open, honest, respectful manner with economically disadvantaged farmers, we could in some small way make the world a better place. Cafe Campesino wanted to challenge traditional win-lose business models and instead help to create and guide a win-win international model for trade. Trade based on mutual respect, transparency, fair and honest practices with a desire to build friendships in coffee growing communities all over the world. A simple but somewhat revolutionary concept. This kind of thinking led us to surprising places – one of them being only 60 miles from our headquarters. As we learned more about why coffee farmers in Latin America were so poor, we learned about land rights and human rights abuses, the civil wars that ravaged Central America in recent decades, and atrocities committed by the military time and time again against peasant farmers in these countries where we buy coffee. And this led us to the gates of Fort Benning in Columbus Georgia. We do not attend the SOA Watch vigil and memorial service every year simply to protest – we attend to support an effort by tens of thousands of priests, nuns, students, and victims to close a small school that is housed within the grounds of Ft. Benning, supported by U.S. tax dollars, and used to train Latin American soldiers over whom we have no control once they leave US soil. Formerly called the School of the Americas, it is now called WHINSEC. While the school clearly taught torture techniques in the past, school officials say they have cleaned up the curriculum and that they now offer human rights courses alongside their counter-terrorism training. We want to see this school closed. Maybe the school has cleaned up its act; maybe at this point closure would only be a symbolic gesture. But symbolism carries tremendous weight – especially with the families of the thousands of innocent victims of this school’s graduates. Our country stands as a beacon of hope for so many from Latin America and beyond. We have asked hundreds of thousands of fellow citizens for sacrifices in the name of fighting terrorism, yet we continue to train foreign soldiers in dubious tactics that have directly led to the terrorism of villages and farming families. Why keep this school open? US taxpayers supporting a school that trains foreign fighters and have been directly connected to thousands of murdered victims in Latin America. . . It makes no sense. We have stood at the gates in support of the effort to close this school for 11 years, serving coffee to the masses, and we will continue to do so until it is closed.
Fair Trade: Where We Are
Cafe Campesino & Sweetwater Organic Coffee believe in Fair, Direct, Transparent trade relationships. We believe in cooperatives. (We are members of one.) We believe in a principled approach to Fair Trade, not a diluted version. We stand in solidtarity with the following organizations that have recently denounced Fair Trade USA/Transfair USA’s decision to depart from the existing Fair Trade system: Red Cafe – CLAC, Fair Trade Network of Asian Producers, Fair Trade Africa, Just Coffee, Higher Grounds Trading Co., United Students for Fair Trade, Fair World Project and Equal Exchange. (Read more about Latin American producers’ position on FTUSA’s move).
Where do we go from here?
-Keep Farmers first. This is an opportunity to re-focus Fair Trade back on the farmers- not the certification discussion or the consumer. This is an opportunity for farmers to get more out of the Fair Trade system and an opportunity for importers and roasters to challenge farmer organizations to start setting their own terms of trade. Fair Trade is meant to serve farmers.
- Continue working. We would rather spend time practicing Fair Trade principles and improving our system than talking about certification.
-Keep a watchful eye. Five years ago, Cafe Campesino withdrew as a Transfair USA licensee (we decided not to use the Transfair sticker), because we did not believe that it was okay to let companies who source only a small amount of Fair Trade products to present themselves as “Fair Trade Certified.” This summer, we joined 10,000 others in signing the Organic Consumers Association’s petition to stop Transfair USA from trademarking the term “Fair Trade USA.” Now, we’re speaking out against Fair Trade USA’s efforts to certify plantations, and we’re wondering what’s coming next.
-Remain Transparent. Along with more than 20 other roasters who are members of Cooperative Coffees, we are posting all of our purchasing contracts at the website, Fair Trade Proof. Find contracts for Cafe Campesino and Sweetwater Organic Coffee on that site, or email us with your questions, info@cafecampesino.com
Interview with: Florent Gout of Cooperative Coffees
Florent Gout during his Sept. 2011 trip to Americus
In an effort to better explain and understand Cooperative Coffees, our importing cooperative of 24 roasters in the U.S. and Canada, I’ve decided to do a series of interviews with Cooperative Coffees’ staff. What can Cooperative Coffees’ staff tell me and customers about why the way we source coffee is so unique? And who are all of these interesting people who work in two separate offices- one in Americus and one in Montreal? First interview? Florent Gout, Cooperative Coffees’ coffee buyer. It’s timely, too, as Florent left Cooperative Coffees’ Montreal office on Nov. 4 to work from home- France (deep sigh). Below are excerpts from my interview with Florent during his September 2011 visit to Americus.
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Name: Florent Gout
Job: Coffee Buyer
Current Office: Paris, France
What do you do at Cooperative Coffees?
Buy coffee. Basically, I try to be a bridge between the roasters and the trading partners. My main role is to buy the coffee that we need, which includes a lot of math, but I also work to maintain the relationship between both the roasters and the producer cooperatives to make sure that information flows back and forth. For example, when there is a specific demand from a producer group for us to change the buying price of their coffee, or if they want us to bring in a transitional coffee, I’m going to receive this request and forward it in a very efficient way to the roasters. I try to create a discussion that will get a response back to the farmer co-ops as quickly as possible.
Read more…
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