La Jornada
April 11, 2001
By Jim Cason and David Brooks, Correspondents (translated by Victoria Furio)

New York, April 10 With the price of coffee dropping to record low levels on the international market, "fair trade" activists in this country launched a successful campaign in churches, universities and local communities to persuade coffee importers to increase the price they pay directly to small cooperative producers in Mexico and other coffee exporting countries.

As a result, coffee imports from small Mexican producers have more than tripled in the last year, according to the organization, Transfair, an agency that certifies coffee called "fair trade."

A large part of this increase is directly related to the national campaign to pressure the big traders, like the Starbucks chain, to include at least one type of coffee grown by small producers to whom a "fair" price was paid directly (without middlemen), which means a price higher than that established by world markets.

Members of Global Exchange, one of the organizations participating in these campaigns, say there are activists in more than 50 universities and several cities who are making demands on the coffee trading companies to sell the bean in a "fair trade".

In March, Jorge Cuevas, of the Rainforest Trading Company located in Oaxaca, toured several universities with the help of Global Exchange to urge students to pressure their academic institutions to sell fair trade organic coffee. Deborah James, Fair Trade Director for Global Exchange, told La Jornada that students from the Universities of California at Los Angeles, Miami, Yale and Ohio Wesleyan College have forced these institutions to provide coffee sold by companies that guarantee they have paid the producers fair prices.

If a university or private company agrees to buy "fair trade" coffee, it must sign a contract with a coffee importer certified as "fair", which means they have paid producers in Mexico and other exporters at least $1.26 dollars per pound.

Starbucks will sell at least one type

"The world price is 60 cents a pound, and after the dealers take their cut, the small producers end up getting between 20 and 30 cents a pound", explained Nina Luttinger, public relations director at Transfair, a monitoring and certifying agency for fair trade. "This way, there is a tremendous benefit for the producers (the higher price for fair trade); after paying the cooperatives' costs, they receive between $1 and $1.06 per pound."

Transfair is a non-profit NGO established in this country to monitor the importation of "fair trade" coffee and to make sure that the companies which say they are paying a fair price to the producers do so.

Their most important contract to date is the agreement with Starbucks to sell at least one type of "fair trade" coffee in its 2,200 shops and cafés around the country, but Luttinger reports that there are now 80 U.S. companies offering fair trade coffee.

Transfair is affiliated with an international organization that visits the coffee cooperatives in Mexico and another 20 countries to assure that the small producers receive the funds promised. According to Luttinger, there is a growing interest in this type of coffee in the United States. The total fair trade coffee imports certified by Transfair in 1999 reached 1.7 million pounds; last year, this figure reached 4 million pounds. "Of this total, imports from Mexico in 1999 represented 15 percent, in other words, some 266 thousand pounds", said Luttinger, "were imported from Mexico."