Hi folks,
It’s been a while since I’ve entered anything here–certainly not from lack of content. I’ll start updating you about what’s going on here in the coming weeks.
I’ll start by noting that we had a booth at the Common Ground Country Fair last weekend. For those of you who live here in Maine, you know this is significant. Coffee has not been allowed on the fair grounds since the Fair’s inception over 30 years ago, for a few different reasons. How’d we get in? Sort of a long story, but the main driver was a change in language (and intent) to one of MOFGA’s mission statements which, essentially, validated the support of sustainable agricultural practices anywhere on the globe. We’re proponents of local agriculture, of course, but were happy to share our product with the CGCF’s 50,000 attendees. We gave away lots of samples, and met lots of nice folks. To those of you who stopped by–thanks for coming out. We hope to be back next year.
We also had an article about coffee in the fair’s program, which I’m going to attach here. This is the longer version–the one that was published was a bit shorter.
Cheers,
Matt
Coffee at the Fair
As a coffee roaster and coffee enthusiast, I am pleased that the product I love has a presence at this year’s Common Ground Country Fair. On the one hand, sipping a cup of meticulously-prepped El Injerto from the Huehuetenango highlands of Guatemala requires no more of an excuse than does sipping a glass of Premier Cru Bordeaux from Lafite-Rothschild. Both are their own justification, perfect unto themselves. And yet coffee is not without controversy—especially at a venue emphasizing the importance of sourcing food locally. If you’re like me, you probably enjoyed a cup or two this morning, and this coffee got to you by way of a circuitous journey with a dubious carbon footprint. From tropical hillside to mill to warehouse to port, across an ocean or two to another port—if it was a decaf, it might have made a detour through Veracruz, or Vancouver—to another warehouse, to a roastery, to a retailer, and finally to you. Yikes.
Likewise, coffee’s social history is pretty ugly. In its movement from Ethiopia (where it originated, and still grows wild) to the Pacific Islands and the Americas, it has left a fair amount of suffering and poverty in its wake. In the modern era, colonialism has given way to exploitation in a new form: prices that have simply been too low to sustain the human beings who grow and harvest coffee. Last year coffee was the world’s fifth most valuable commodity, behind only oil, coal, wheat and corn. Yet the market at the time of this writing—prices paid by traders, and not the money paid to producers themselves—hovered at around 78 cents per pound for robustas (the stuff they use for instant coffee, among other things), and $1.40 for mild arabicas (the canned stuff you generally find at a box store). And these prices are, historically speaking, quite high.
While there isn’t a whole lot we can do about the distance coffee travels from seed to cup—there won’t ever be a Finca Katahdin—there are organized efforts to bypass unjust market conditions and get more money into the hands of the people who actually grow the coffee we enjoy. Among these are programs run by organizations such as Utz Kapeh, the Rainforest Alliance and, perhaps most notably, TransFair USA. In the case of the latter, the organization sets and makes sure that producers receive a fair trade minimum price, and green coffee importers and roasters who enroll in TransFair’s program pay the organization a fee for each pound of green coffee purchased as well. These monies fund its auditing system and create an additional pool of funding for social and economic projects in coffee growing communities.
Organic certification has also provided farmers with opportunities to reach consumers in ways unavailable fifteen or twenty years ago. As someone attending this fair, you already know that growing produce without the aid of petroleum-based fertilizers and chemical pesticides is better for the earth and the people who belong to it. In the coffee lands, this means decreased nutrient run-off into local water supplies (it takes a lot of water to process coffee), a chemical-free working environment for those who tend to and harvest the coffee, and more varied and abundant flora and fauna on the farm itself. But the growing desirability of organic produce has also resulted in better incomes for organic coffee farmers—a boon for those who, unable to afford fertilizers, had been utilizing organic methods by default.
In the midst of such progress, however, farmers have encountered formidable challenges: fair trade non-profits themselves acting more like businesses than advocates, bureaucratic and governmental hurdles, the myriad costs (in money, labor and lost yields) that accompany organic certification at origin. While a third party certification label signifies a marked improvement over commodified coffee, and provides a consumer some minimal assurances pertaining to sustainability, it does not necessarily speak to best practices, and certainly not to ideal solutions.
The stakes in making the coffee chain more environmentally sustainable and economically just are exceptionally high. Consider the Oromia Coffee Farmer’s Cooperative Union in Ethiopia, a country producing some of the most delicious coffee available (and a country currently experiencing pains as it attempts to better control its primary export by creating its own coffee exchange). Last year OCFCU produced 144,000 tons of coffee, or about 1 ¾ percent of the world’s annual supply. An incredible 617,000 households were involved in the production of this coffee only. There are literally tens of millions of individuals who depend upon what we drink for their livelihoods.
While the enormity of the global coffee industry may make your own choices seem insignificant, it is this very scale that can allow coffee lovers to make a real difference. As we demand more responsibly sourced and better quality coffees, and so drive up prices paid to producers, we improve lives. Even a ten or twenty cent per pound increase given to coffee farmers at origin makes a dramatic difference in their quality of life. There is a long, long way to go in making the global coffee landscape truly “fair,” but there are many folks involved in the coffee chain doing what they can to bring this vision closer to fruition.
As one of those links, I invite you to ask your local shop owner or roaster about the coffee they sell: where it comes from, who grew it, what cultivar it is, how it was processed. Ask them about the certifications of their coffees, and how they know their coffees are sustainably grown. Ask them about the goofy tasting notes they provide on the bag or menu board. (Coffee contains over 1000 compounds—fats, proteins, carbohydrates—while wine has “only” 150.) And sure, ask them about that coffee made out beans culled from animal poop. (It’s called Kopi Luwak.) And take more care in preparing your coffee. Drink less coffee, but drink better coffee. And really enjoy it. It’s not a Caffeine Delivery System. It’s a special beverage.
Cheers,
Matt Bolinder
Matt’s Wood Roasted Organic Coffee
Hi folks,