Fair Trade News

12/27/2003 | The New York Times

Helping Farmers, a Cup of Coffee at a Time
By Katie Zazima

CANTON, Mass. -- A poster on a wall at Equal Exchange, a food cooperative here, asks a question that literally hangs over the heads of its employees: What would Jesus drink?

The answer, they say, is brewing in thousands of places of worship around the country: ''fair trade'' coffee.

For the past eight years, Equal Exchange, which imports so-called fair-trade coffee, tea and cocoa, has made partnerships with missionary groups, religious organizations and individual churches to help them switch from mass-produced cans of coffee to beans bought directly from coffee cooperatives at prices that guarantee a living wage to small farmers in 17 countries.

By exporting the coffee themselves, farmers earn considerably more a pound than if they sold through industry middlemen. Equal Exchange said it paid the cooperatives $1.26 a pound for regular coffee and $1.41 a pound for organic coffee. On the international market, coffee for March delivery closed at 63.25 cents a pound this week.

''For these small farmers who are feeling the benefit of this project, it's enormous,'' said Erbin Crowell, director of the Equal Exchange Interfaith Coffee Program.
The company, founded in 1986, is trying to market fair-trade chocolate and sugar as well, Mr. Crowell said.

Rodney North, whose title at Equal Exchange is ''answer man,'' said the company had about 30 percent of the fair-trade coffee market in the United States and about one one-thousandth of the country's coffee market.

The churches and the company call the partnership a natural. Coffee hour is an integral part of Sunday worship for many denominations, as are commitments to social justice and missionary work. Drinking fair-trade coffee, leaders of these groups say, is a way to live out that commitment daily.

Religious organizations can buy the coffee for $5 to $7 a pound, a per-pound discount of roughly $1.50 from supermarket prices. The company created a special coffee, Fellowship Blend, for use in large percolators. Ten one-pound packages cost $50.

''It's important for us to help Catholics to be able to do their day-to-day living, and live out principles of Catholic faith, which call us to be people of justice,'' said Joan Neal, the deputy executive director of United States operations for Catholic Relief Services. ''While we are asking people to pay a little more for fairly traded coffee, we are assuring them that that little bit more will make a big difference in the lives of small farmers and their families and their children.''

The relief agency, which represents Roman Catholic parishes, schools and groups in 195 dioceses nationwide, allied with Equal Exchange last month. It hopes to enlist 1,900 parishes, or 10 percent of the nation's Catholic churches, in the program by November.

Last year 7,000 congregations nationwide bought 125 tons of coffee, tea and cocoa from Equal Exchange, about 15 percent of the company's business. Other participating groups include Lutheran World Relief, Presbyterian Church U.S.A., the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee and the United Methodist Committee on Relief. Mr. Crowell said the company also did business with some Buddhist temples.

''Coffee is basically of sacramental stature in the Lutheran Church,'' said Jonathan Frerichs, a spokesman for Lutheran World Relief, which started a fair-trade program in 1997. ''But there's very little said about where it comes from. It's mostly about the mystique, the exotic providence of the crop, and fair trade lifts up the farmer again and again. That's why it feels so solid in churches.''

Mr. Frerichs said that Lutherans drank 45 tons of fair-trade coffee last year, and hope to double that next year. ''We're not increasing wanton coffee drinking, we're saying replace what you normally buy with fair-trade coffee,'' he said.

But some people, like Ms. Neal, said they drank more coffee now that they had switched to Equal Exchange because it tasted better.

On a recent Sunday, members of the United Methodist Church in Lexington snacked on Christmas cookies and sipped fair-trade coffee from small Styrofoam cups. Ken Kreutziger and Bob Miner instituted the church's program three and a half years ago, and persuaded the United Methodist New England conference to serve fair-trade coffee at all parishes. Mr. Kreutziger plans to bring a resolution before the church's general conference next year asking the national church to buy fair-trade coffee and tea.

The Lexington church brews decaffeinated coffee at the 10:30 a.m. coffee hour; caffeinated Earl Grey tea is also available. The church often sells the fair-trade coffee as a fund-raiser, and it brought in extra shipments this month so members could buy the products as Christmas gifts. Most members say they now drink only fair-trade coffee.

''It's always been an unintentional sin,'' Mr. Miner said about drinking other kinds. ''No one wants to keep these people in poverty, but no one thinks about where coffee comes from.''

Michael Arnott persuaded the First Unitarian Society of Newton in West Newton, Mass., to change its coffee eight years ago. On a recent Sunday, members poured coffee from carafes into cups emblazoned with the Equal Exchange logo. Mr. Arnott stood at a nearby table, selling coffee, tea, cocoa and chocolate bars for a church fund-raiser.

Dr. Erica Foldy, a professor of public and nonprofit management at New York University, and her husband, Dr. Roger Luckmann, a professor of family medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, bought a few bags of decaffeinated coffee at the 11:30 social hour. The couple, who live in Natick, Mass., said their New Year's resolution was to switch completely to fair-trade coffee.

At the Beth El Temple Center in Belmont, Mass., Margery Williams sells coffee, tea and cocoa each month. At the last sale, she raised about $60 for the temple. Mrs. Williams, who said she and her husband drank coffee ''incessantly,'' became involved in the fair-trade movement after the Sept. 11 attacks, and brought it to the temple soon after.

''It really made me see how this little luxury in which I indulge myself on a daily basis was really coming out of the hides of these farmers,'' she said. ''I looked at the coffee in my hand and said, 'This is ridiculous.' ''

Rob Everts, who helped found Equal Exchange in 1986, said the company wanted to bring on more religious groups but did not want to outpace itself so it could provide good customer service.

''Say someone is in Fargo and they're used to paying $2.99 a pound and suddenly they're paying more and these are great debates going on in churches,'' Mr. Everts said. ''But more often than not people are buying in for the mission and values and discovering great coffee.''