Fair Trade: A Global Force for Good
When is a cup of coffee more than a cup of coffee? When it helps lift up farmers and artisans around the world.
Excerpted from an article in Thrivent Magazine.
Congregations across the country have embraced fair trade — and its ideals.
Lord of Life Lutheran Church in The Woodlands, Texas and many other churches buy their coffee from Equal Exchange, a fair trade, for-profit, worker-owned cooperative that works with small-scale farmers. This year marks the 20th anniversary of a partnership between Equal Exchange and Lutheran World Relief, an international, nongovernmental organization that focuses on sustainable development projects.
LWR Fair Trade, as the partnership is called, began when a staff member at Lutheran World Relief brought in an article about fair trade coffee, says Chandler Carriker, Lutheran World Relief’s senior manager for constituent engagement. “That person raised a crazy question: What if we helped Lutherans rally around this as a further way to help those living on the margins of society around the world?” he says. They tested the project for a year, asking Lutherans to buy Equal Exchange coffee for themselves and their churches. It quickly caught on.
For Jim Gramlich, a member of Westlake United Methodist Church in Westlake, Ohio, a trip to El Salvador brought the impact of fair trade into focus.
“Before Equal Exchange got involved, people would come in and give the coffee farmers that we visited next to nothing for their coffee, and they had to take it,” he says. “Equal Exchange pays a fair, stable price and maintains a long-term partnership with communities to help them earn an honest living and produce good coffee.”
Gramlich, who earned the nickname Mr. Coffee by selling fair trade coffee after Sunday services for more than a decade, knows it’s about more than just a cup of joe — the coffee he sells provides funds for the church’s missions and supports farmers across the globe.
“We’re helping people sustain a better life through what we buy,” he says.
‘Called to Help’
When people buy fair trade coffee, they are helping farmers improve their skills. For every pound of fair trade food products sold through LWR Fair Trade, Equal Exchange donates 20 cents to LWR Small Farmer Fund, which supports small farmers worldwide. In one current project, farmers of cacao (the bean that becomes chocolate) in the Philippines are receiving answers to their questions about cacao and nursery management through a textmessage-based application.
“As Christians, we’re called to help one another, especially those who face extreme poverty or don’t have enough income to support their families,” says Brandi Monroe-Payton, engagement manager for Lutheran World Relief. “Especially if people are already drinking coffee or eating chocolate, why not make it fair trade, so you can help someone out?”
Coffee and cocoa farmers face difficult working conditions. Without fair trade, they are at the mercy of global prices that can soar one year and crash the next. Fair trade also means that people work in safe conditions, no child labor is used and producers show respect for the environment.
Quality coffee is grown at high elevations, often in areas that are difficult to reach with a vehicle. The beans require a lot of manual labor to harvest, explains Rick Peyser, senior relationship manager, coffee and cocoa, Lutheran World Relief.
In Central America, for example, the coffee harvest usually ends in late February or March. By May, most small-scale farmers have used up their earnings. That means their families may have to eat less than usual, or they may borrow from friends, starting a cycle of debt. They refer to this time as “the thin months.”
Fair trade sets a minimum price for coffee farmers and helps them sustain their families year-round. “I think of it as an insurance policy,” Peyser says. If the market price is above the current fair trade price, the farmer receives the market price. “If the world coffee price tumbled and went below the fair trade minimum floor price, it buoys you up at a reasonable level,” he says.
In addition, the coffee cooperatives vote on how to use the extra money, or “social premium,” they receive through fair trade sales to help their communities. With that social premium, which is included in the purchase price, they may choose to build a classroom, a medical clinic or a road to get their coffee beans to market.
For those involved in fair trade, there’s nothing more satisfying than seeing fair trade items on the shelf in their local grocery store. “That’s a real success because at the end of the day it makes a difference in the lives of more and more farmers, and that’s our desire,” Carriker says.
