GENESE

Fair Trade Coffee

When I was asked to review a coffee shop, it made me feel somewhat uncomfortable. As a change of plan, I surveyed the trade problem of coffee. We all know that the price of one cup of coffee is not so reasonable when you drink it in a coffee shop like Starbucks or Angel-in-us…….

Anyway do you know how much money the people earn who produce the coffee beans, the raw materials, in developing countries? Some statistics reported that those farmers get only 0.5% of the money you pay for the coffee you enjoy in Starbucks. It's unbelievable. Where does the money flow to? Does it vanish into thin air?

Coffee comes from the seed, or bean, of the coffee tree. Coffee is a beverage made by grinding roasted coffee beans. So, from the coffee trees to our cups! Coffee is really a big item. It's consumption is 2.5 billion cups a day worldwide. It has the second largest trade volume after the oil trade.

In reality, the children who work on coffee farms do not even earn enough money to go to school, while they are working hard at the farm. Someone has to break the chains behind this exploitation of multinational coffee companies and pay farmers the price of legitimate labor. The fair trade movement started to change. Not only direct trade but also to give more benefits to the farmers.

There are some organizations for that activity. Most of all Fairtrade International, namely Fairtrade Labelling Organizations International, was established in 1997.

Fairtrade labelling organizations exist in 18 European countries as well as in Canada, the United States, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. It develops and reviews Fairtrade Standards, and assists producers in gaining and maintaining a Fairtrade Certification Mark. It is a kind of independent guarantee that ensures disadvantaged producers in the developing world are getting a better deal, and is used in over 50 countries.

Next to FLO, one of the most influential organizations is Global Exchange. It is an advocacy group and NGO, based in San Francisco. The group's mission is to promote human rights and social, economic, and environmental justice around the world. The formation of the organization was rooted in the increasing interdependence of national economies and the subsequent need to build political alliances across national boundaries to protect economic, social and political rights.

What does Global Exchange do for fair trade? The Fair Trade Program works to promote Fair Trade, end child and forced labor and trafficking in the cocoa industry, as well as educate and empower children and adults to advocate and purchase Fair Trade products.

What companies are their main targets?

Previous corporate campaign targets have included Starbucks and M&M's. Currently Global Exchange is working to push The Hershey Company to go fair trade and end forced labor in the cocoa fields. The campaign is called "Raise the Bar, Hershey."

So coffee is the most well-established fair trade commodity. Growth in the fair trade coffee industry has extended the commodity away from if being focused on small farms and companies. Now multinational corporations such as Starbucks and Nestle use fair trade coffee. (Even just a few of their trade.) The largest sources of fair trade coffee are Uganda and Tanzania, followed by Latin American countries such as Guatemala and Costa Rica. Major importers of fair trade coffee include Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.

Basically, the main purpose of the campaign is to fight against child labor. Aside from child labor, there is human trafficking and slavery in the chocolate business. For example, The Ivory Coast, a small country in West Africa, is the world’s biggest producer of cocoa, the almond sized beans that are made into chocolate treats for children in America, Europe, and other parts of the world. In the Ivory Coast, over 200,000 children work full-time jobs, many processing the cocoa beans on large farms. A 1998 UNICEF George Polk Award winning report titled “A Taste of Slavery: How Your Chocolate May be Tainted”(By Sudarsan Raghavan and Sumana Chatterjee / Knight Ridder Newspapers), revealed that as many as 12,000 of the 200,000 child laborers are quite likely victims of human trafficking and slavery. 30% of children under age 15 in sub-Saharan Africa are child laborers, mostly in agricultural activities including cocoa farming. Over 5% of the children are victims of human trafficking or slavery. It is estimated that more than 1.8 million children in West Africa are involved in growing cocoa. Many of these laborers come from Mail, Burkina, Faso, Benin, and Togo. The children are lured into the workforce with promises of money, housing, and education.

One of the saddist stories: When Aly Diabate was just 11 years old, he was taken by a slave trader and sold to a farmer in the Ivory Coast. The man promised him a bicycle and $150 a year to help support his poor parents in Mali. He worked 80-100 hours a week and was beaten. At night he was locked in a windowless shed with 18 other boys. Aly was lucky, because he survived thanks to a boy's escape. The slaves were then sent back home. Aly was paid $180 for the work he did, but he is still left with physical and mental scars. However, there are still cacao bean farms that use slaves to harvest the beans and beat the slaves without reason.

The cruelest fact of all is that Aly said he doesn't know what chocolate is. Americans spend $13 billion a year on chocolate, but most of them are as ignorant of where it comes from as the boys who harvest cocoa beans are about where their beans go.

That’s why we all need to support fair trade. If we don’t go fair trade, we won’t enjoy the sweet chocolates comfortably without thinking of their anger and frustration of the primitive producers. Though we shouldn't do that through charity! Fair Trade is all about improving lives. Through Fair Trade Certification not only do farmers earn a higher price for their goods, they also receive an additional premium fund for community development projects. These funds are used for things like building schools, health care clinics and clean water wells, as well as for home loans, scholarships and transportation. Fair Trade empowers communities to take their futures into their own hands.

To go fair trade, you should visit Global Exchange (http://www.globalexchange.org/)! There you can find programs you might be interested in. It would be the first step to make the world from a profit-oriented globe to a human-centered planet without the exploitation and the unequal distribution.

........................................................

영어 공부하다가 - Michael Sherman 선생님 반.