Fair Trade Coffee on the Rise

San Antonio Express-News (Texas)
January 10, 2004, Saturday , METRO
Bonnie Pfister

For the connoisseur willing to hand over a wad of folding cash for
a single cup of coffee, shade-grown beans and organic blends are old
news.

Enter "fair-trade" coffee, the fastest-growing segment of the specialty
coffee market, in which roasters willingly buy and sell coffee for a
few dollars more per pound to return a livable wage to growers on
cooperative farms across Latin America, Africa and elsewhere.

Getting a cup of such joe brewed for you in South Texas still is
something of a quest. Cafe Latino, tucked behind San Antonio College
off Main Street, uses fair-trade coffee almost exclusively. Locally,
Starbucks brews fair-trade beans in its "coffee of the day" on
the 20th of the month and sells fair-trade beans by the pound.

California-based TransFair USA certifies that participating farmers are
to be paid $1.26 cents per pound for traditionally grown coffee and
$1.41 for organic beans.

Compared to the 68 cents a pound ordinary coffee was fetching on
international commodities markets Friday, it can make a big difference,
fair-trade advocates say.

TransFair was founded in response to the plummeting worldwide price of
coffee, which tumbled from $3.18 in 1997 to a rock bottom 42 cents in
2001.

Overplanting combined disastrously with Vietnam's aggressive entrance
Into the market. Vietnam now competes with Colombia as the
second-biggest Producer after Brazil.

For struggling farmers, every little bit helps, According to a report
by anti-poverty organization Oxfam, between 2001 and 2002 falling prices
drove 600,000 coffee farmers in Latin America from their land, as they set
off for urban centers and points north in search of a livelihood.

At a fair-trade symposium outside of the World Trade Organization
meeting in Cancun last September, 30-year-old Oaxacan farmer Guadalupe
Quiroz said being a member of a cooperative recognized by TransFair was
a necessary lifeline.

"If we could do it with other products, too, that would be good," he said.

But the fair-trade label isn't immune from critique back at home. Some,
Like Whole Food's subsidiary Allegro Coffee, say TransFair sometimes
puts quality second to the cause. H-E-B groceries favor their own Cafe
Ole brand, Maintaining that the grocery's supplier pays farmers prices comparable
to that of TransFair.

And some, like roaster Dean Cycon , accuse the big-name purveyors of
Buying just enough fair-trade coffee to wrap themselves in the cloak of
social consciousness.

Dean's Beans, Cycon's 10-year-old company near Amherst, Mass., buys all
Of his coffee at the minimum fair-trade prices. He has little good to
say about Starbucks, which, while it buys fair-trade coffee in the
millions of pounds annually, still sells 99 percent conventionally
priced coffee.

Twelve percent of the coffee sold by Green Mountain Coffee, a leading
specialty roaster from Vermont whose packaged beans are available at
Sun Harvest, is fair trade.

It's a percentage the firm plans to grow, said Green Mountain spokesman
Rick Peyser. Since it began roasting fair-trade beans, sales of that
segment have grown by 50 percent every year - three times as fast as
its conventionally priced beans.

H.E. Butt Grocery Co. began offering packaged TransFair certified beans
in a handful of its San Antonio stores early last year in response to
customer requests. But the firm's coffee buyer, Walter Nimocks, said
consumers can do just as well by farmers by buying Cafe Ole, its house
brand.

Its wholesaler, JBR of San Leandro, Calif., pays a "considerable"
premium over the price of production to its growers.

In addition, it helps build daycare centers and schools near the coffee
farms. TransFair "is a very well-intentioned organization," Nimocks
said. "It's admirable and its needed. But when a customer buys Cafe Ole, they're
doing more."

Copyright 2004 San Antonio Express-News