The Global Politics of FoodThe Campaign to Humanize the Coffee Trade

Fulfilling Dreams
The activists who run the Fair Trade network don't have rules about how the farmers spend their extra money. The farmers in the co-op in Pueblo Nuevo are funding a business project for their wives so the women can raise livestock and make clothes and sell them. It's the first time that women in this village have ever earned and controlled their own money. Farmers in another co-op have just built their own coffee factory. They're planning to use the profits to build a health clinic and a school.

And if you visit a farmer named Raymundo Nicolas, you'll find that some farmers are using their Fair Trade money to join the world of consumers.

When we drop by his farm just after sunrise, Nicolas' wife is standing by the kitchen fire. She's been up since 4 a.m., rolling corn meal into dough and slapping out tortillas. As soon as Nicholas and his two sons have eaten a stack, along with some black beans, they head down the hill into their trees.

Each coffee tree is about 12 feet high, and dense with shiny leaves. The branches are covered with clusters of bright red berries. The little coffee beans that you'd recognize are hidden inside that red pulp. Now that he's making more money selling Fair Trade coffee, Nicolas says, as he snaps off berries and tosses them into a bucket, he's buying things that his family never dreamed possible. They just got their first television—a 20-inch color TV. Fortunately, they live close enough to town to get power.

And that's not all: Nicolas bought a special machine that grinds the red pulp off the coffee beans—a tool that's saving him hours of labor. "I also bought my bed, the bed where I am sleeping now," Nicolas laughs, sheepishly. "I was able to buy all these things."

New Era
The Fair Trade system could never have existed a dozen years ago in Guatemala or most of Central America. This is a grassroots campaign to give poor farmers more power, and the dictators who ruled this region had activists tortured and killed for less. These days the civil wars are over, and there's basically no more terrorism, so there's room for Fair Trade to take root.

Eventually, if the system spreads, Fair Trade organizers expect that they could see a backlash from middlemen in the coffee industry, who could potentially lose large numbers of farmer clients to the Fair Trade network. So far, though, the system is too small to dent their profits.

But those concerns are far off in the future. There's at least one immediate obstacle that's preventing more farmers from getting involved. Coffee companies in the United States aren't selling much Fair Trade coffee.

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