Coffee Not Coughing Up Enough in Guatemala
Times.com reports that small-production Guatemalan coffee growers can’t make ends meet, even with higher Fair Trade prices. Living in La Antigua Guatemala, I can’t escape the enticing aroma of “cafe.” Here, most of the cafe is supplied by major local producers whose farms carpet the hills surrounding the Panchoy Valley. Producers like the R. Dalton Coffee Company at Finca Filadelfia or Azotea Cafe at Finca Azotea are certainly not having any problems. Finca Filadelfia is a continually developing lush resort with an elite hotel, coffee tours, canopy tours and more. It’s sad to know that these operations can rake in the dough while smaller coffee farmers can’t even make ends meet.
Ever since Jesuit monks brought coffee to Guatemala three centuries ago, raising the beans has been a losing business for small farmers. Conditions are miserable–try lugging 100 lb. of fertilizer up a mountain–and even though coffee is the world’s second most valuable traded commodity, after oil, the money it brings in is measly. “It’s not enough to live on,” says Luis Antonio, who has grown coffee near Quetzaltenango, in Guatemala’s western highlands, for three decades but gets deeper in debt each year. “What we earn isn’t enough to buy food for our children.”
Antonio and the world’s 25 million other small coffee growers don’t have a lot of career alternatives. So you’d think they would be enthusiastic about Fair Trade–a global campaign that for 25 years has sought to bring struggling Third World farmers, including Antonio, out of poverty by paying them higher-than-market prices for everything from coffee to quinoa. Along the way, it has recruited retail giants like Starbucks, which is the globe’s largest purchaser of Fair Trade–certified coffee.
But the future of the Fair Trade–coffee movement is in question, as some backers raise concerns about whether it has reached the limit of how much it can help. In a private-industry survey last year of 179 Fair Trade coffee farmers in Central America and Mexico, a copy of which TIME obtained, more than half said their families have still been going hungry for several months a year. “When I got the results, I was shocked,” says Rick Peyser, director of social advocacy for Green Mountain Coffee Roasters in Vermont, the Fair Trade company that commissioned the survey. “I was ready to quit.”
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