Fulfilling Dreams
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 televisiona 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 beansa 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
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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