Fair Trade in Legal Drugs
I’ve been behaving strangely in the last few weeks. This is the
result of a combination of factors. First, it is the end of the semester
and I have been writing an average of 10 pages a day about wastewater
treatment, shadows, and federal land purchases. Second, my bike was stolen.
It was just sitting there outside my house and someone was thinking of
how long they had to walk, and they decided it would be faster on my bike.
On the whole, I’m fine with this; I’m just not sure why they
haven’t brought it back yet.
This has resulted in me staying up later than usual (writing), and getting
up in the morning early to catch the bus, which only runs once an hour.
And so I get to school earlier and sleepier. When I get to school, I drink
coffee, something I’ve never done, and find very interesting. .
Keep your ears open in a coffee shop and sometimes you hear weird things.
Apparently there are lots of types of coffee and I was shocked to learn
that there is a lot to know about coffee. Coffee can be coffee, or it
can be (as it was in this particular coffee shop) organic, fair trade,
bird friendly, shade grown, non-genetically modified coffee. I mean…holy
crap.
It seemed strange to me that coffee was this important anyhow, but it
turns out it’s a huge crop. There are more than 25 million coffee
farmers in the world, and most of them are very poor. Coffee is the second
most traded commodity in the world after oil. The story of coffee, and
why there are so many social, economic, and environmental issues tied
to it is horribly confusing, but I’m going to do my best to tell
it pretty quickly.
Coffee is a drug, and like any drug it sells pretty well. So poor people all over the world decided to plant coffee and sell it to rich drug addicts like me. So far so good. Coffee, being a shade loving plant, was grown in the understory of large old growth forests, providing a product with little ecological damage. But then, with the help of USAID, a lot of larger coffee farms were converted to ‘sun farms’. These are created by cutting down the old growth forests, allowing the coffee to grow in the sunlight and thus increasing yield by about 500%. The results of this were fewer forests, less birds, and a flooding of the coffee market. Last year alone OXFAM burned 1 billion pounds of coffee in order to shelter markets from the surplus.
Though the large sun farms suffered due to the crashing prices, smaller shade farmers were annihilated. In order to survive they either had to cut their ‘bird friendly’ ‘shade farms’ and convert to sun farming, or they had to somehow persevere.
They were able to persevere because of the fair trade movement. A pound of coffee at the grocery store costs around $4. A pound of coffee on the commodities market costs around 60 cents. Just by giving farmers a slightly larger hunk of the final cost of our coffee, they can feed and educate their children, and they can retain their traditional farming practices. And that’s what you ensure when you buy fair trade.
I had recently heard that Starbucks buys fair trade coffee, but that’s a stretch. Only one percent of the coffee Starbucks buys is fair-trade. The rest is intimately tied to social and ecological destruction in South America and across the world. Sorta like gasoline…but tastier.
I’m pretty angry that I now find it difficult to function without my daily drug. But it’s good to know that, while it may raise my blood pressure and shorten my lifespan, it does not promote deforestation and poverty. And though I had to spend an entire afternoon researching all of this crap, at least now I know why the expensive coffee has so many little labels on it. Now I know that if my coffee doesn’t have those labels on it, my drug habit hurts more than me.
For a full year I wrote a weekly column for a daily paper in Boulder CO. I wrote about being young, poor and green, and the column was widely loved throughout the city. It remains one of the most rewarding things I've ever done.
If you've got some time on your hands...check 'em out.
Colder than the Hinges of Hell
Four More Ounces of Responsibility