'Cause Coffees' now produce a cup with an agenda as 'shade-grown',
'fair-trade' and other eco-friendly, socially aware blends of java
attract new consumers. From Seattle in the USA, Patrick McMahon
reports ...
Now you've figured out how to order a double tall latte, decaf skinny
with no foam, there's a whole new coffeespeak brewing.
Bird lovers want you to buy "shade-grown"
coffee to protect disappearing rain forests used by migratory songbirds
in Central and South America. Purists concerned about pesticides
push "organic" java. Worried about impoverished Third World coffee
growers? There's "Fair-Trade Certified" coffee that guarantees farmers
a minimum price.
In this hot spot for boutique coffee as well
as in an increasing number of cities across the nation, coffee is
being poured with an environmental and social agenda. The big chains,
led by Starbucks, are acceding to activists' demands that they offer
these "cause coffees." While these brews are sometimes branded politically
correct, "we prefer to call them sustainable coffees," Washington,
D.C., activist Christopher London says. "They sustain the environment,
and they sustain the farmers."
But there's a catch. "It has to taste good
for people to buy it," says London, who promotes ecological labeling
for coffee at Consumer's Choice Council. "If you can't sell it,
it's not sustainable."
But many of these blends are selling, with
the help of environmentalists and other activists extolling their
virtues and demanding more availability. While still a minuscule
part of the U.S. coffee market, these beans and brews are being
sold at Borders Books cafes, Hyatt hotels, campus coffeehouses and
grocery giant Safeway. Seattle-based Starbucks, the nation's largest
gourmet coffee retailer, now promotes blends of Fair-Trade Certified,
organic and shade-grown coffees.
"There is extraordinary excitement with people
in our stores about things like shade-grown," Starbucks chief executive
Orin Smith says. Starbucks stepped up its promotion of "cause coffees"
after it became the target of protests by human rights groups demanding
that it sell fair-trade blends. But many Americans just don't take
their morning cup of joe all that seriously.
"At 6 a.m., I really don't care about the
rest of the world. I just want to wake up," says Seattle law student
Jeff Yuhasz, 32, who keeps a can of Folgers in his freezer. "It's
definitely an issue of political correctness."
Many consumers say they like making an impact
with their coffee. Philadelphia concert promoter Larry Ahearn, 53,
drinks three or four cups a day. His current brew is an Azteca Blend
from Trader Joe's gourmet grocery chain.
"It's shade-grown, 100% organic, Equal Exchange,
Fair-Trade Certified," he says. "Everything but Eugene McCarthy,"
(the antiwar presidential candidate in 1968).
"When I buy shade-grown coffee," Ahearn says,
"I feel like I'm voting for a better environment or a better world."
Caffeine-charged Politics
Coffee is the second most-traded commodity
in the world after oil, measured in export dollars. It is produced
in 80 countries in tropical regions, most of them environmentally
sensitive. The largest exporters are Brazil, Colombia, Vietnam,
Indonesia and Mexico. The largest importer is the United States.
Fully 80% of adult Americans are regular
or occasional coffee drinkers. Only 14% say they're daily consumers
of gourmet coffees - premium blends, latte, espresso, café mocha,
cappuccino and frozen and ice-blended coffee beverages. But that
number represents almost 29 million people, up from about 8 million
five years ago, according to a 2001 survey by the National Coffee
Association.
Today's sustainable coffees - a small niche
of the gourmet market - are not as new as they are newly visible.
Organic coffees - once found mostly in health-food stores - and
the others are just getting more space in grocery stores and on
the menus at coffee bars.
"It's really an emerging trend," says Gary
Goldstein, a spokesman for the coffee trade group. While nothing
might seem less contentious than a cup of hot coffee, environmental,
economic and labor issues abound: World coffee prices are at decade-low
levels, prompting concern that low-paid growers will abandon their
crops for work elsewhere. Tropical rain forests continue to dwindle
as farmers clear-cut hillsides and fields to grow coffee in sunshine,
a faster process than shade-grown. Sun-grown coffee also requires
more pesticides, a greater concern for workers than drinkers because
processing removes most chemicals. Clear-cutting in the highlands
of Central and South America also is removing traditional habitat
for migratory songbirds that spend the winter there.
"Coffee touches so many people, from the
coffee plant to the coffee cup," says Helen Ross, who runs the Seattle
Audubon Society's Northwest Shade Coffee Campaign. "People don't
realize the huge effect on birds, workers and forests."
Growers in Decline
No one is suffering more from the fall in
worldwide coffee prices than small-scale coffee farmers. Even Juan
Valdez is hurting. The mythical coffee farmer who stars in Colombian
Coffee Federation ads with his sturdy mule Conchita has fallen victim
to the plummeting world price for beans. Federation ads featuring
him were cut almost in half this spring. But the effect has been
far more brutal elsewhere.
In May, 14 migrant workers died in the heat
of the Arizona desert after crossing the border with Mexico. Half
were identified as coffee farmers who had left their jobs in Veracruz,
Mexico, in search of better-paying jobs in the United States.
"Prices are so low that we are at risk of
having farmers opt out, and we will be unable to get the quality
we want," Starbucks CEO Smith says. "This is of grave concern to
all the specialty-coffee people."
Suppliers, roasters and retailers now have
dozens of projects underway in South and Central America to improve
the lives of coffee farmers and maintain quality supply lines. Starbucks
is working with the environmental group Conservation International
to improve shade-grown production near Chiapas, Mexico. Other retailers
on the bandwagon include Seattle's Best Coffee, Bucks County Coffee
Co. in Philadelphia, Equal Exchange in Canton, Mass., and Taylor
Maid Farms in Sebastopol, California.
Consumers looking for independent evidence
that these coffees are organic, shade-grown or bought at a fair
price to farmers need only look on the back of packages in the store.
Some are certified by groups such as the Rainforest Alliance, the
Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center and several organizations that
monitor organic farming.
What difference does all this make? Fair-Trade
Certified coffee, for example, guarantees farmers in cooperatives
a minimum $1.26 a pound, far more than the current world price of
43 cents. Fair-trade prices will give the typical Latin American
coffee farmer an annual income of about $2,000, compared with the
current $500, says Paul Rice, executive director of TransFair USA,
an Oakland non-profit group that certifies fair-trade coffee in
the United States.
"This is the difference between a small farmer
carrying sacks of coffee on his back, versus buying a mule," Rice
says.
The fair-trade coffee movement is growing.
TransFair USA certified 2 million pounds in 1999, 4.3 million pounds
in 2000 and "we project 9 million this year," Rice says. Coffee
seems an unlikely focus for rallies, protests and benefit concerts
featuring Bonnie Raitt. But not in Seattle, where coffee is taken
more seriously than almost anyplace else. And that means Starbucks.
Starbucks was founded in 1971 in Seattle
and named for the first mate in Herman Melville's Moby Dick. Thumbing
its nose at fast food in the fast lane, it pioneered the modern-day,
stay-as-long-as-you-like coffeehouse. It has grown from 84 locations
in 1990 to 4,435 stores in 39 states and 21 foreign countries. This
month it reported $2 billion in sales for the last nine months -
up 23% from the same period a year earlier.
Targeting Starbucks
Starbucks' meteoric rise coincided with increasing
concern about coffee itself. The same affluent baby boomer consumers
who liked Starbucks' no-hassle atmosphere grew more interested in
the content of their coffee. Soon after protests against the World
Trade Organization's summit meeting in November 1999 left downtown
Seattle trashed and hundreds arrested, Starbucks found itself taking
heat.
Starbucks says it was already planning to
market fair-trade and Earth-friendly brews when members of Global
Exchange, a San Francisco human-rights group, picketed the company's
annual stockholders meeting in March 2000, demanding that the retailer
sell fair-trade coffee.
"Immediately, I got involved," CEO Smith
says. Even as it moved to provide more Fair-Trade Certified coffee,
Starbucks encountered a new group of protesters at this year's annual
meeting. This time, it was the Organic Consumers Association targeting
Starbucks' milk - a major ingredient in lattes, mochas and other
espresso products. The chain's milk wasn't guaranteed to be hormone-free.
Starbucks said it offers the same kind of milk sold in grocery stores,
but only 25% is guaranteed hormone-free. Later this month, it will
offer an organic, hormone-free milk alternative.
In the same vein, activists here have launched
a major education and advertising campaign to get people to buy
more sustainable coffees - of any brand. The highlight came in June
when recording artists Raitt, Jackson Browne and Keb' Mo' held a
concert in Seattle to benefit the Songbird Foundation, which seeks
to protect songbirds and their habitat. Nostalgic boomers in faded
jeans and long skirts packed the refurbished Paramount Theater to
hear the three mix politics with music. Microbrews were everywhere,
the aroma of marijuana surprisingly faint. Browne, 52, his silky
brown hair slung over his forehead, told the audience to try sustainable
coffee: "Being able to change our lifestyle just a little will make
a big difference." The artists were there to support their longtime
friend, singer-songwriter Danny O'Keefe, who founded the Songbird
Foundation in 1997 and wrote and recorded the 1972 hit, Good Time
Charlie's Got The Blues.
"Quality is the bottom line," says O'Keefe,
who roasts his own coffee. But by buying sustainable coffees, he
adds, "consumers can have quality and really make a difference.
Every cup of coffee makes a difference."
Not everybody cares. "The average American
isn't ready for this," says Julie Barrett, coffee director for Dunkin'
Donuts. The chain recently offered a "French Roast Eco-Blend" in
Maine, Boston and Chicago but decided not to go nationwide yet.
"They're not asking for it enough," Barrett says.
But for some, the message is catching on.
"Sometimes you'll ask for a cup of shade-grown or fair trade, and
people give you a blank look, but not so much anymore," says Tom
Keefe, a Spokane, Wash., lawyer who ran unsuccessfully for Congress
in 2000.
"In the era after WTO, especially in Seattle,
it's not surprising to see consumers asking more questions about
the products they buy: Who makes it, where did it come from and
what's in it?". - from USA Today.
