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The shadow of all economic success stories to date has been long, and the Cafe explosion is no exception. The producers of the coffee bean, the soil and people of Africa, South America, Melanesia, etc are kept in servitude via low prices for their product while the retailers make billions of, usually, dollars. Now the small coffee farmer has to contend with GE - when will this madness stop? Probably when people start making buying decisions on other than price and start to consider ethics. A UK development charity says the prospect of genetically-modified (GM) coffee threatens poor farmers with ruin. The charity, ActionAid, says the new coffee would offer no significant benefits to coffee drinkers. The technology,
being developed by a Hawaii-based company, works by making all the
coffee berries ripen at the same time. This would cut labour costs
and, ActionAid says, force small farmers out of the market. A report
by the charity, Robbing Coffee's Cradle - GM coffee and its threat
to poor farmers, says 70% of all coffee is grown by smallholder farmers.
They depend on the crop for all or part of their livelihood, and ActionAid
fears they could not survive the GM plants' introduction, which lies
some years ahead. Ethiopia depends on traditional coffee production
for almost 70% of its export earnings. The Ethiopian delegate to the
UN Food and Agriculture Organisation is Dr Tewolde Egziabler. "It's
a shift from a labour-intensive to a capital-intensive system, from
small farmers to large farmers." INDEPENDENT (London)17 May 2001 For Tatu Museyni, the plunge in the price she is paid for her coffee crop grown in the lush foothills of Mount Kilimanjaro has had two simple effects: "My children don't go to school and we starve." A widow, she relies on the income from her 30 coffee trees in the village of Kishimundu, north Tanzania. She has little time for the far-off machinations of the international coffee market other than to note with incomprehension and despair that they have cut the money she receives in half in less than a year. Impoverished growers in Kishimundu and the surrounding communities now receive $0.28 for every pound of Arabica beans they produce compared to an already meagre $0.60 paid last year. The result is
that Tatu, who lost her husband three years ago and struggles to maintain
her quarter-acre smallholding, has seen what she earns from her main
cash crop fall from $19.50 to $9.31. This is her reward for working
12 hours a day and travelling up to 14 miles to collect water and
provisions. On such an income, the battle to pay the $21 annual fee
needed to send her two daughters Angera, 15, and 13-year-old Mary
to the village school becomes impossible. She said: "Education is
very important. It will help my children to have a better life. But
now it is difficult to pay. Sometimes my children are chased out of
school because I can't pay." The mother, whose dead husband's family
refuse to give her financial help because of a land dispute, has abandoned
plans to send her third child, Isaiah, nine, to the school. Instead,
she is considering selling her pig, her "savings" in north Tanzania's
agrarian economy, to buy her two daughters some extra time at school. Coffee has been very good to Howard Schultz, the chairman and chief global strategist of Starbucks. The precocious kid from Brooklyn is now overlord of a worldwide business empire that has turned into a true cultural phenomenon: the chain-style coffee shop where no latte is too grande. Starbucks has more than 4,000 branches worldwide, with an average of three more opening every day. About 2,700 outlets are in the United States and more than 100 in the United Kingdom. There are even plans to bring Starbucks to Italy. Ever since he talked his way into the management of Starbucks in 1982 (then a bean-selling operation in Seattle), turned it into a retail outfit and eventually bought the whole enterprise, he has been driven by an almost missionary zeal to bring his version of the Italian coffee experience to a worldwide audience. The corporate culture at Starbucks is, like Schultz, easy-going and concerned with a sense of community. Staff are well paid and enjoy generous benefit packages. However, there has been criticism by anti-globalisation protesters of Starbucks' coffee-buying practices and identikit outlets. Schultz's response has been typical: hurt indignation and an anxiety to make amends. Starbucks now sells Fair Trade Certified beans in 2,300 of its outlets (but does not yet use them in the coffee it brews for its customers). Schultz has just bought himself a $200m (140m) controlling stake in the Seattle SuperSonics basketball team. For every Schultz there's a million Museyni ... that's called global economics, do you buy it?1
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