A Jolt of Reality: Waking Up to Coffee's Impact

Coffee steam rises from the counters of greasy spoons and past the windows of ivory towers. Every level of society has coffee drinkers, brown rings replicated on financial reports and sanitation department memos alike as if an unofficial seal of solidarity.

Since the coffee break was introduced at the dawn of the industrial revolution, employers have been supportive of the productivity-enhancing beverage. A mild dose of caffeine gives an energy boost to the blue collared and speeded up the intellect of the white collared. But despite being a stable fixture of the wage earner, coffee has an even greater significance in the world of the artist. Many creative people regard coffee as an artistic fuel, their muse-in-a-mug. Cafés nurture a culture of intellectuals and dilettantes, self-styled rebels and freethinkers. Paintings scar the walls, conversations spiral in ever tightening circles and a poet sits and scribbles, scribbles and sips.

And it's hardly a surprise that coffee is the drug of choice for many creators. It's mind altering without being dehabilitating, and the coffee house is an ideal place for introverts -- it's possible to socialize without being too social. Unlike most food businesses, cafés place less of a focus on turnover and consumption -- loitering is allowed. And at an average of a buck a cup, it's very affordable -- probably a big factor in its popularity among a segment of the populace not exactly renowned for its disposable income.

SPARE THE COST OF A COFFEE?

But why is coffee so cheap? In relation to other beverages, the mug o' mud is a steal. Compare it to the colas marketed by Coke and Pepsi, which are comparable in price to coffee: manufactured domestically, these products are sugar water with minimal natural ingredients. Coffee, on the other hand, can only be grown at a certain elevation and climate, goes through complex processing from its plant state to its final brewed state, and must go half way around the world from its Third World producers to its First World consumers.

No matter which way you do the math, it just don't add up. The amount of resources and labour that go into producing an end product that sells so cheaply means that someone along the way is getting screwed.

Oxfam, an international development organization which funds self-help projects in Third World countries, says that people are paying for the hype rather than the help. "The [corporations] have developed a preference for packaging," said Meyer Brownstone, Chair of Oxfam. "People should be outraged that they're paying for the packaging and advertising and not the human labour."

Because the price of coffee is set at a world market price, the producers are paid the lowest possible price that First World buyers can get -- and it can get pretty low. While meeting market demands in the First World means cutting costs and even layoffs, plantations in the Third World have resorted to flagrant human rights abuses to compete.

Rigoberta Menchu's autobiography documents such abuses in excruciating detail. Working on a Guatemalan finca (plantation) in the `80s included getting doses of toxic pesticides, as they were forced to continue working in the fields during crop dusting. Because it offered the peasant class's only chance of avoiding starvation, these work camps were essentially run with slave labour -- keeping profits up for the plantation owners and costs down for the coffee companies. Conditions eventually kill Menchu's brother:

...the caporal told my mother she could bury my brother in the finca but she had to pay a tax to keep him buried there... We didn't know what to do. It was impossible to take the body back to the Altiplano. It was already starting to smell because of the humidity, the heat, on the coast.

Even in situations that are less extreme than those described by Menchu, gross inequities still exist. Lisanne Morgan, leader of the Student Christian Movement at York University, went on an exposure trip to the Dominican Republic. She explains that the independent growers would not sell directly to corporations, but that there were intermediaries who would sell to corporations in more convenient bulk amounts. Usually store owners as well, these middle men would pay the growers in credit; and if the credit ran out between seasons, they would lend them money.

"They would end up paying 200-700% in interest," Morgan said. This resulted in many growers being perpetually in debt: "It functioned like a small version of the IMF [International Monetary Fund]" she said. "They'd say `Here, let me loan you money so you can pay back your debt to me and I'll charge you interest on it.'"

Both Nestlé and Proctor and Gamble direct any questions regarding their producer's quality of life to public relations agent Dave Wilkes from the Coffee Association of Canada. He cited excellent relations with growers and points to a Costa Rican conference and programs like "Coffee Kids" as progressive industry initiatives.

But "quite frankly," he said, "it's hard to be aware of each and every situation." Brownstone saw the "excellent relations" as doing very little for the farmers: "In the case of a corporation dealing with a plantation, you have two giants collaborating in a mutually satisfactory way."

SECOND SIGHT

Alton McEwen, president of Second Cup, deals with plantations on a regular basis. He said he sources 14% of his stock directly, which means he flies to the plantation and deals with the owners in person. Asked about the possible exploitation in the remaining 86%, he said "I've seen absolutely nothing of it." When pressed, he suggested that if there were "instances," they were "small and isolated."

"Sometimes I ask myself -- where would these people be without coffee?" he mused during a telephone interview. At times McEwen seemed rather envious of the Third World peasant. "They're happy as can be, I've picked [coffee] with them, they have their children out there -- it's really quite pleasant." And while most of the natives are calm and sedate ("They're not going around organizing and complaining," McEwen said) he inferred jokingly that some of them are downright restless: "In Papua New Guinea you might get eaten for lunch" by the "tribals." But these attitudes aside, there remains the moral dilemma that First World involvement inevitably encourages Third World exploitation.

"I can't deny that there's going to be unscrupulous people," said Dave Wilkes, "How would you change that?"

HOW WOULD YOU CHANGE THAT?

A company called Bridgehead had a suggestion. An offshoot of Oxfam-Canada, they pay what they termed a "fair market price" for clothes and goods from developing countries. As opposed to the world market price, the fair market price is set at a higher rate, through their cooperatives, and takes into account quality of life. Unlike the plantations which are often owned by one individual, the cooperatives are made up of independent farmers. This enables farmers to bypass the middleman buyer and get out of the perpetual debt owed to these people.

While this costs more, the difference is covered by the low amount of advertising Bridgehead does. Morgan saw first hand the benefits of buying from cooperatives. Where she visited in the Dominican Republic, the cooperatives ran workshops on leader formation, literacy programs, and a medical clinic. Being operated by the same people who used it made a noticeable difference, she said. "The public clinic was always empty, while theirs was always full."

Tonia Hancherowe from Earth Shoppers, an organization that stresses the need for "ethical consumers," pointed out how growing coffee affects the environment. "Huge amounts of pesticides are used," she says. She explains that the coffee plant is naturally an intensive crop and tends to drain the soil; plantation owners are obviously less sensitive to this issue than individual growers who farm ancestral land, so by doing business with the latter Bridgehead supports the indigenous ecosystems.

Bridgehead also has a mandate to be culturally sensitive in relation to indigenous trade. For instance, buyers will purchase what the local artisans have traditionally produced, instead of putting them to work on items that they think will be in economic demand. Not only does this result in a more genuine and unique item for the consumer, but also supports a diversity of culture. While the slickly produced Bridgehead catalogue features the conventional grinning models and sales pitches, the models are ethnically diverse and the profit goes towards sustaining an unconventional company -- one that takes responsibility for the changes it causes by doing trade.

BACK TO THE CAFE

In an environment where moral dilemmas of great subtlety are regularly hashed out by artists of finely tuned sensibilities, not a lot of thinking is going on. Most coffee enthusiasts don't even know that the original form is a berry, rather like a cherry, and that this is removed to reveal the familiar bean. It's not a shock, therefore, that many more don't know the quality of living of the farmers who pick it.

But the responsibility of those who have more to those who have less is always there. Like it or not, the consuming habits of the First World have a thundering impact on the Third. The economic power of consumer choice makes the most destitute of North Americans an honorary millionaire. The individual can then choose to play the part of the most contemptibly unmindful aristocrat -- or to act, philanthropically, for social justice.

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This was originally published through excalibur, January 1995.