Five mornings a week, your alarm goes off, you get up, get dressed and leave. If you’re like 63 per cent of Canadians, you bang back a hot, life-giving cup of coffee before you start your workday and go off to a job you may or may not like. Why? To keep a roof over your head, put food on the table, and save something for yourself.
At the same moment , somewhere in Nicaragua, a woman – let’s call her Maria – gets out of bed, throws on some clothes and goes off to work in a field. She plucks the berries that, when roasted, will become your morning coffee.
Why does she do it? To keep a roof over her head, feed her family and maybe save for something for herself.
With the proliferation of coffee joints in North America – and let’s face it, in Centretown there must be a Second Cup, a Starbucks , a Tim Hortons and a Bridgehead at least every two blocks – and the popularity of four-dollar mocha lattes, one might think the coffee industry is a profitable one.
Not for Maria.
The abundance of coffee drives prices down, and the coffee goes through multiple middlemen– roasters, exporters, and the like – who each take a cut.
The CBC found in a 2007 exposé that the people who actually harvest the coffee get as little as 11 cents on the dollar.
But we can help – for free.
More and more coffee chains are selling fair trade coffee.
This coffee is bought from organizations working directly with growers to ensure they get a fair price.
In some cases fair trade organizations pay growers more than three times what the big brands pay.
This makes it sound like buying fair trade will have a huge impact on our pockets –but not so much. Starbucks sells fair trade coffee for the same price as any other coffee–from $1.80 (small) to $2.30 (large) for a regular cup.
“There are only a few brands of beans we sell that are certified fair trade . . . but if customers come in and ask for fair trade, we’ll give them the fair trade that we offer,” says a barista at Starbucks at the corner of Bank and Slater. “People don’t come in asking for it a lot.”
The Second Cup at the corner of Slater and Metcalfe, just like its twin at Bank and Laurier and other Second Cup outlets across Ottawa, has started an advertising campaign about its fair trade products.
“All our beans are fairly traded, but only one – our Cuzco blend – carries the fair trade label,” says a barista there.
The label ensures that sellers have met a long list of international standards, producers have been paid a certain price and farms have also been given a premium – an amount of money to be collectively spent on improvements workers choose to make.
Like at Starbucks, there is no price difference between fair trade and non-fair trade coffee, and here it will cost you even less, between $1.65 and $2.15 a cup.
Bridgehead, for its part, sells fair trade certified coffee and tea only.
For between $1.67 and $2.14, you can be certain that most of the money you spend is going to Maria and her colleagues.
It doesn’t take a lot of money or effort to buy fair trade.
At most downtown coffee shops, including the smaller, independent places that cater to the nine-to-five crowd, all you have to do is ask.
By asking, you could make a world of difference to the Marias, who, after all, get up and go to work in the morning just like you do.