Course: Agriculture, Food and the Environment in Catholic Social Teaching
[ENVS 161]
Every day we let liquids slide down our throat, wind through our bunched intestines and process in our stomachs almost involuntarily. But as our body takes time to process our liquid, our mind should realize dimensions of liquid beyond just the enticing taste or consistency. We need to be cognizant of the faces behind our drinks and hands that our receiving our money. The international market of fair trade coffee, which is mostly grown in the tropics and consumed primarily in the farther north, suffers from consumers’ lack of ethical awareness. There is a poor rural coffee grower at the end of every cup of your coffee.
The lack of awareness of the implications of the coffee you are buying perpetuates the historically exploitative relationship of world trade. Fair Trade coffee seeks to challenge the unfair lopsided relationships of world trade (4). In short drinking should be a moral act. More specifically, drinking coffee should not just be politically fashionable or indiscriminately chosen for the caffeine boost. As caffeine affects fade, social interactions end and coffee cups land in trash cans, should the purpose of drinking your coffee end as well? No, the purpose of drinking coffee should not end in momentary action or satisfaction. Anybody concerned about sustaining biodiversity and the human dignity small coffee growers in the tropics should morally funnel their decision making processes. Coffee should be consumed ethically by purchasing Fair Trade coffee.
When you pay extra for Fair Trade coffee, your money effectively communicates that coffee growers should have the economic justice to be able to afford the cost of living. Costa Rican Fair Trade coffee producers earned on average forty percent more each season than they would have selling to mainstream markets (4).
Consumption of non Fair Trade coffee is being a passive buyer, don’t make coffee just another impersonal commodity. Catholic social teaching calls for distributive economic justice. You may or may not be Catholic, but these teachings are rooted in scriptures and anybody with goodwill should recognize the purity of these Catholic ethical arguments calling for public action. Distributive economic justice, in the context of Fair Trade coffee, purely suggests that small coffee growers deserve to receive a sustainable amount of money for the labor of growing coffee.
Buying Fair Trade coffee also enforces the concept of social justice in supporting the concept of the rural family. Instead of buying coffee from a large corporation hiring individual, unrelated workers, Fair Trade coffee provides a unique opportunity to endorse the proliferation of tightly knit families united by their manual labor on the coffee farm. Fair Trade farmers are faithful stewards of the earth because they are dependent on the annual harvest of their crop as their sole source of income and thus their vehicle for food and human dignity. On the other hand, the conventional farmer is paid for the action of his job and not the richness of the harvest, disconnecting him or her directly from a motivated stewardship of the land.
Catholic Social Teaching endorses rural families: "Rural communities and cultures, with their focus on family life, community, and close ties to the land, serve as welcome signs of these social dimensions of Catholic teaching" (8). This readily calls Catholics to buy Fair Trade coffee sustaining family life for those especially on the margins of society. If rural coffee growing families do not receive their economic justice, they may move to urban localities. In Central America, many farmers have left for the cities or emigrated northwards leading to civil disturbances in Honduras and Guatemala and there’s also reports of farmers’ suicides in India (3). These families depending on fair prices of coffee should not have to lead to the desperation of civil disturbance or even self-inflicted death.
There is a right to life and to family and while purchasing fair trade coffee may not be able to help every family, it is most definitely a positive step towards keeping families nourished in their rural setting. The social justice of you buying Fair Trade coffees keeps these families overcrowding urban schools and forcing them to work a variety jobs not close to the home. A poor rural family could easily disintegrate with their focus not being on family life but monetary life, with parents and maybe children feverishly working long hours away from the home. So the more Fair Trade coffee is consumed, the more the retailer will be stressed to purchase more Fair Trade coffee and the more farmers will likely be certified Fair Trade, or if the demand exceeds supply farmers already certified Fair Trade will possibly be able to bargain more money.
This growing potential for steady income does not force farmers to leave their families in desperation of discovering a viable income elsewhere. For instance, in 2001 six coffee farmers from Veracruz, Mexico left their families with dreams of finding monetary support in the United States and were found dead in the Arizona desert (1). In this extreme scenario, buying coffee that was not Fair Trade could tell businesses that the consumer does not believe that farmers need to receive sustainable amounts of income, leading to the farmers’ trek trying to escape poverty but actually ending in death. Even if the men do not die, they still put enormous pressures on their wives and children. Leaving their family in search for work leaves the women and children to maintain the land, usually meaning the kids have to drop out of school (1).
The economic justice embedded in Fair Trade coffee is yet another reason to drink fair trade coffee. For I Was Hungry promotes economic agricultural justice stating, "We believe the economy, including the agricultural economy, must serve the people, not the other way around" (8). While the healthiness of the economy does indirectly relate to peoples’ well beings, it is the direct health of people that we should be worried about. Since Vatican II, the church has clearly stated the need to protect the economic rights of each human person (2). Coffee growers are the source of the coffee in your cup and deserve to live a life of human dignity. Many times these stewards of the land do not receive sufficient funds for their labor to barely scrape the bottom cost of living.
The fair price requirements of Fair Trade guarantee the market value of a pound of coffee to be at least $1.26 and if the trading rate is higher, Fair Trade sets the market value five cents higher (5). In this agreement, intermediaries and vertically integrated companies cannot bully their coffee growers into a heavily depreciated price. Fair trade operations rules of operation also allow grower associations to request up to 60% of their payment as pre-payment for promised deliveries, essentially obtaining credit from these buyers (5). Pre-payments are valuable to small farmers because they usually are received at time when they are preparing next year’s harvest. This liquidation of cash provides the acquisition of essential resources to have a timely and productive harvest. Cash also allows families to feed themselves and send their kids to schools. Besides children’s school enrollment, in Nicaragua 33 percent of children under the age of five are malnourished, in part because of the fall in coffee prices (4).
Fluctuation of coffee prices means fluctuation of the quality and dignity of coffee farmers. Malnourishment of humanity obviously does not constitute for a sustainable future. In Vietnam’s Dak Lak province, the income derived from the worst off farmers, dependent solely on coffee, is now categorized as pre-starvation (1). Why should farmers be condemned to starvation by the market? Part of coffee growers being victims of the market lies in the unawareness of the families of where and whom their coffee originated.
The idea of Fair Trade coffee necessarily shortens the distance between consumer and producer. The northern consumer needs to realize the humanity in the coffee cup of southern producer in the tropical latitudes. It is too easy to take coffee as a distant, disconnected drink. The realization of buying Fair Trade coffee extends you past the clerk, the coffee bean bag, the processing company who prepared the coffee beans roasting their color from green to brown, but to the grower setting the entire production of the coffee in motion. This connectedness makes drinking coffee a recognizable moral act or somewhat immoral act depending on your choice of blend. This ensures the Catholic social teaching of coffee drinkers having a right to know that other eaters around the world have a secure food system (2). While it may not be explicitly known if the food system is secure, your ethical decision to buy Fair Trade coffee is a sustainable act in assuring these farming families have sufficient quantities of food to eat every day.
Another incentive to buy Fair Trade coffee lies in its quality. Traditionally Fair Trade Coffee is labeled "Arabica" meaning shade-grown. Arabica certified coffee means that natural trees are interspersed commonly enough to provide sufficient shade. In actuality there are a variety of shade-growing techniques ranging from purposely strategically planted trees to growing coffee within dense rainforest. Shade-grown coffee is more natural than vast fields of monoculture because sun-grown coffee requires harmful use of chemicals to counter the stressful effects of direct sun exposure. Robusta coffee encourages deforestation leading to, in Central America, lack of habitat for migratory birds and also adversely affecting a wide array of other natural creatures (1).
Effectively, growing robusta produces higher yields of coffee and lower yields of the previously inhabiting wildlife. The arabica coffee is more greatly revered in taste than "robusta" or sun-grown coffee. This specialty arabica coffee connects high quality and distinctive flavor well to the label of Fair Trade coffee. So if you are not buying Fair Trade coffee for the small farmer at least you may indirectly benefit the small farmer. However, the more ethically superior decision to make would be to buy the coffee directly for the social dignity of the likely poverty-stricken farmer. Even if the small grower does not suffer from poverty I believe it’s still better morally to give hard working stewards of the land their fair share of the revenue instead of sinking money into the processing or selling level businessman on their fifth wives or husbands. The social dignities of these middle and end level businessman are assuredly no where near poverty level of the growers; they do not even need to pay for the resources necessary for the next harvest.
Economic justice needs to be dealt to the people at the foundation of the coffee you drink. The principles of Catholic social teaching should be recognized at the corporation retailer level. As with coffee growers getting a price that is below the cost of production, the companies’ booming business is being paid for by some of the poorest people in the world (1). Corporations, like Starbucks, did not have Fair Trade coffee available on their menu or even much written policy on where their coffee beans originated. Now, via pressure of consumer demand Starbucks has a social responsibility link on their website that asserts, "Starbucks and the Fair Trade movement share common goals: to ensure that coffee farmers receive a fair price and to ensure that they can sustain there farms for the future" (6). So, the consumer has begun to make corporations at the least present pledges and ethics to their coffee. Even if these claims are insincere or fueled by the ulterior motive of profit, corporations are now considering the respect for human dignity through encouraging farmers to receive fair, sustainable prices for the coffee they have grown. Quantifying some statistics, Starbucks, for instance bought 2.1 million pounds of fair trade coffee in their 2003 fiscal year, a proclaimed 91% increase from the previous year (6). This marked increase, though positive, is most likely relatively low to their total poundage of coffee bought every year because Starbucks would almost double their bought coffee if Fair Trade was actually a primary buying source.
To give you an idea of how much coffee Starbucks needs to buy, Starbucks owns twenty percent of all the cafes in the United States and currently serves ten million people each week (7). The millions of pounds of non Fair Trade coffee Starbucks must have to satisfy these statistics must be enormous. Sophisticated risk management and hedging allows companies, at the click of a computer mouse, to buy from the lowest-cost producer (1). On the other hand coffee producers have to deal with enormous risk. Without roads or transportation to local markets, without technical back-up, credit, or information about prices, the vast majority of coffee farmers are at the mercy of traders offering a ‘take it or leave it’ price (1).
This unfortunate dichotomy of disproportionate risk put on the producer does not adhere to the principle of protecting human dignity. Companies rob many farmers of their right to nourishment, education and having integrity in their livelihoods. However, the vehicle to increase human dignity and decrease economic concentration in the retailer of specifically Starbucks and other coffee corporations is to purchase Fair Trade coffee-- simply to ask for Fair Trade coffee at the counter. Starbucks claims that Fair Trade coffee "can be brewed by coffee press during store hours upon customer request" (6). So the issue of choosing to buy Fair Trade coffee starts lies with your awareness of asking specifically for it. Coffee corporations will respond to your demand of Fair Trade coffee as Starbucks has begun to respond.
Fair Trade coffee is increasingly converging with organic coffee. The social ethics blend well with the ecological ethics of producing coffee. Of course there is always a tension between the production and sustainability, the need to conserve agriculture resources for the future, but Catholic social teaching calls for a respect for creation. Organic coffee provides this respect by not using pesticides and other chemicals that damage the soil, inhabiting animal biodiversity and the farmers. Organic sustains the environment adhering to practices such as integrated pest management, agroforestry, crop rotation and crop diversity. Therefore IFOAM’s new standards focus on such issues as indigenous rights, and "require that certification programs shall ensure that operators have a policy on social justice and that there should be no organic certification for production that is based on violations of basic human rights (5). Globally, 39% of the Fair Trade coffee associations also produced Certified Organic coffee in 2002 (5). These social and ecological issues provide a synergistic experience of drinking. Drinking a cup of coffee should not only be consuming a dark liquid, but combining social and ecological ethics intertwined in the coffee.
Fair Trade, Certified Organic coffee widens the scope of morality past solely social and economic justice to also encompass ecological justice. While Fair Trade coffee growers deserve the humane benefit of a fair price on their labor, there is also an ethical dimension present in the land. Fair Trade coffee does not guarantee organic coffee production, pesticides, fertilizers, irrigation and other non-organic practices could possibly be used by Fair Trade farmers. It would be ethically best to buy a Fair Trade and Certified Organic blend, but if presented with the option is it more ethically conscious to buy Fair Trade coffee or Certified Organic coffee? Honestly I am not certain if it is more ethically sound to act on account of social justice of the person or to act bearing in mind the ecological justice of the land. It is hard to choose because if the coffee-growing land, if abused conventionally and not sustained organically could have ill long term effects on the social dignity of the farmer.
So it is difficult to choose immediate positive social effects and possible negative ecological effects by purchasing fair trade coffee or oppositely buying Certified Organic coffee inducing possible immediate negative effects, but creating positive long-term sustainable ecological impacts. Hopefully Fair Trade coffee will continue its convergence with Certified Organic coffee so this choice of morally drinking singularly Fair Trade coffee or Certified Organic coffee will not need to be decided. As these increasingly converge, if you do not buy Fair Trade you won’t only being disregarding respect of creation in the human form but also in the environmental form.
In conclusion drinking Fair Trade coffee should be a moral act. Catholics especially should drink Fair Trade coffee in understanding of the connected principles of Catholic social teaching. Acknowledging the right to human life and considering the underprivileged coffee growers in the tropics, coffee should be served at reception after mass. This conscious investment in humanity has concrete rewards, the coffee, as well as the intangible rewards in the goodness of knowing you’re providing dignity to coffee-growing families. At coffee stands and cafes, the extra amount of money you may pay for Fair Trade coffee specifically aids these coffee growers through trade. It is effectively a sustainable donation to these rural, poor families.
Spending more money for Fair Trade means that you are drinking not just to make rich companies richer but to make the poor richer. It extends the money full circle and makes the retailer realize you have this deep perception and that if you are going to drink the company’s coffee they have to lend farmers this same respect. Your conscious buying power helps pursue for the common good of society and economic justice to those who need it most.
Works Cited
1. Gresser, Charis and Sophia Tickell. "Mugged: Poverty in your Coffee Cup." Oxford:
Oxfam 2002.
2. National Catholic Rural Life Conference. 1 Dec. 2004 <http://ncrlc.com>
3. Oxfam International. "Walk the Talk: A Call to Action to Restore Coffee Farmers’
Livelihoods." May 2003.
4. Raynolds, Laura T. "Consumer/Producer Links in Fair Trade Coffee Networks."
Sociologia Ruralis 42 (2002): 404-424.
5. Rice, Robert A. "Noble Goals and Challenging Terrain: Organic and Fair Trade
Coffee Movements in the Global Marketplace." Journal of Agricultural
and Environmental Ethics 14 (2001): 39-66.
6. Starbucks, Fair Trade and Coffee Social Responsibility. 2003. 16 Nov. 2004
< http://www.starbucks.com/aboutus/StarbucksAndFairTrade.pdf>
7. Straus, Tamara. Fair Trade Coffee: An Overview of the Issue. 30 Nov. 2000. 6 Dec.
2004 < http://organicconsumers.org/Starbucks/coffback.htm#4>
8. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. For I Was Hungry & You Gave Me
Food. Washington D.C.: United States Conference of Catholic of Catholic
Bishops Inc., 2003.