The plummeting price of coffee on global markets hasn't gone unnoticed by local java purveyors who have a conscientious bent. "We're in the middle of a major coffee crisis," says Coffee Exchange co-owner Susan Wood, speaking over the steady buzz of the mid-afternoon crowd at her popular Wickenden Street café, describing how wholesale prices for some quality beans have dropped to 70 cents a pound. "That is a ridiculous rate. If I can buy a pound of coffee for so little, how much do you think comes back to the farmers who harvested it? Probably not much."

Concerns about this kind of inequity has motivated progressive café owners to offer Fair Trade-certified coffee, which ensures that small coffee growers in South America and other developing areas receive a decent wage for their efforts. Fair Trade emphasizes standardized minimum prices and supports direct, sustainable relationships between buyers and farmers to avoid exploitation by middlemen.

Still, despite widespread agreement about the values of Fair Trade coffee, local supporters have misgivings about a proposal that would require coffee sellers in Berkeley, California, to sell only Fair Trade, organic, or shade-grown (to reduce deforestation) coffee. The initiative by 36-year-old lawyer Rick Young, which will appear on the November ballot, would not apply to beans or ground coffee, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, but violators would be guilty of a misdemeanor and could face $100 fines and six months in jail.

Jed Arkley, co-owner of White Electric Coffee on Broadway, notes that although the shop doesn't exclusively sell Fair Trade, organic, or shade-grown brews, most purchases come from a retailer specializing in Fair Trade coffee. "Selling Fair Trade coffee is just one piece of the whole puzzle," Arkley says. "We represent part of the neighborhood's mission for low prices, fair employment, and fair wages. We are a socially conscious establishment, but to sell only fair trade, organic, or shade-grown coffee would mean higher prices all around. It's a tough trade-off."

At the Coffee Exchange, which offers up to eight kinds of Fair Trade coffee, Wood feels similarly. "It's important that people and businesses have an option to go with Fair Trade and environmentally friendly coffees," she says. "Keeping an open market gives importance to our mission statement. Without free trade, there is no Fair Trade." In another form of using coffee's popularity to promote social justice, Wood and some of her cohorts formed Coffee Kids, a non-profit that makes business loans available to women and small farmers in developing countries, in the '80s.

More progress could be made through the nation's largest coffee sellers. Chains like Starbucks and Peet's offer one or two Fair Trade certified, organic, or shade-grown coffees. Dunkin' Donuts, which bills itself as the world's largest coffee, donut, and bagel shop, "agrees with many of the goals of Fair Trade," says a spokesman at the company's Randolph, Massachusetts, headquarters, and is "currently exploring ways to meet these goals. But the company, which doesn't now offer Fair Trade, organic, or shade-grown coffee, self-servingly suggests that increasing consumer demand for its own brews might be the best way to help coffee farmers.

Issue Date: July 25 - 31, 2002