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Note #7992 from PCUSA NEWS to PRESBYNEWS:

Coffee with a conscience sell
03463
October 29, 2003

Coffee with a conscience sells

Presbyterians help Chiapas farmers form cooperative

by Ignacio Ibarra
Arizona Daily Star
Reprinted with permission

AGUA PREITA, Sonora, Mexico - When he arrived in this city from the village
of Salvador Urbina eight years ago, Daniel Cifuentes had lost hope that his
small coffee farm in Chiapas could earn enough to support his family.

	A coffee-roasting cooperative that peddles justice and fair wages in
every cup of joe brought it back.

	"My plan was to come here and work at whatever I could find, because
of necessity. If I'd had the opportunity, I would have crossed into the
United States because of the same necessity," said Cifuentes, who took jobs
in factories and labored in construction earning a little more than he could
as a coffee farmer.

	When despair and hopelessness made crossing into Arizona illegally a
possibility, his wife would tell him to wait, saying "at least here we're
still together."

	Now Cifuentes is a manager and a coffee roaster for Cafe Justo - Just
Coffee - a cooperative of Salvador Urbina farmers that roasts and packages
12-pound batches of coffee for shipment to the United States. He is one of
three paid employees at the roasting facility in Agua Prieta.

	Cafi Justo ships more than 300 1-pound packages a week and is primed
to keep growing because American consumers are willing to pay more for coffee
that factors in environmental concerns and fair wages for the Mexican farmers
who grow it.

	Cifuentes and 34 other Salvador Urbina coffee farmers are finding
America's caffeine lovers seem willing to pay their asking price of $8 for a
pound of dark-roasted, natural, shade-grown and bird-friendly coffee.

	While the cooperative's coffee costs about twice as much as some
well-known brands and about the same as any gourmet or specialty coffee, it
is a price that provides the farmers a better chance to support themselves.

	It also reduces the need for the farmers or their children to leave
Salvador Urbina in search of better pay, said Eri Cifuentes, Daniel's brother
and the current elected head of the cooperative in Chaipas.

	That helped attract interest from Fronteras de Cristo, the
Presbyterian Church (USA)'s border ministry in Agua Preita.

	When the Rev. Mark Adams noticed that many members of the Lirio del
Valle - Lily of the Valley - Presbyterian Church were from Chaipas, he and
other church members learned that many Chiapas farmers were being forced to
leave home because of low coffee prices in a glutted market.

	That began a dialogue within the church about "how to enter into a
just relationship between those people growing the coffee and respond
positively to what was going on with immigration."

	They helped the coffee farmers organize on the fair-trade model, a
system that begins with the premise that farmers deserve a livable return for
their product, and provided them a $20,000 loan as seed money for the
cooperative. It let the growers own the roasting facility and market and
distribute their product.

	All three paid employees of the cooperative's roasting facility are
Mexican and two are former Salvador Urbina coffee farmers.

	"So all of the money stays in Mexico, all of the job creation is in
Mexico and all of the profit margin stays in the Salvador Urbina community,"
said Adams. "It's a new kind of model and the hope of Just Coffee is to take
that model and share it with other communities."

	Cafi Justo's plan called for selling a ton of coffee in the first
year of operation. With a month left until its first anniversary, it has sold
more than four tons.

	And recently, Cafi Justo got an order for 2,000 pounds of roasted
coffee beans from a California-based grocery store chain.

	"Things here are bad, but they'd be very critical without the
advantages that the cooperative has provided. The buyers are not interested
in paying for our coffee," said Eri Cifuentes in a telephone interview from
Chiapas.

	He said local brokers will pay about 350 pesos - about $35 - for a
quintal, about a 100-pound sack of green organic Arabica and robusta coffee
beans.

	The cooperative is able to pay its members more than $130 per
quintal.

	The goal of Cafi Justo is to be able to market its coffee so well
that one day all of the coffee farmers in Salvador Urbina can join the
cooperative, controlling the 3,000 to 5,000 quintales of coffee grown there
each year.

	The coffee crop accounts for about 70 percent of agricultural
production in Chiapas.

	The prospects look good for coffee cooperatives like Cafi Justo, said
Tim Kingston, a spokesman for Global Exchange, a fair-trade advocacy group in
San Francisco.

	The amount of fair-trade coffee sold grew by 54 percent from about
6.8 million pounds in 2001 to 10.6 million pounds last year. It and other
members of the specialty coffee market were the most dynamic performers of
the otherwise stagnant coffee market, he said.

	The growing importance of coffee with a conscience was highlighted
last year by the decision of coffee giant Starbuck's to include fair-trade
coffee among its products.

	Proctor & Gamble, the makers of Folger's, announced in September that
it too will include fair-trade coffee in its specialty lineup.

Editor's note: For more information about the Presbyterian Church (USA)'s
support for fair-trade coffee, visit the website
www.pcusa.org/pcusa/wmd/hunger/coffee. - Jerry L. Van Marter

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