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…