Poor Farmer

By Paul Smith OGB Online March 29, 2007 Coffee. It brings many thoughts to people’s minds: caffeine fix, daily ritual, yuck, jittery, Starbucks. I hope there’s another thought that comes to mind: structural injustice. Increasingly, the coffee trade demands us to look at the plight of many coffee growers and their continual, cyclical bondage of poverty in the current market system. My concern arises from what I have learned from the coffee industry and my experiences studying abroad in Ethiopia, the “birthplace of coffee.” The disparity between the price of coffee that goes to the producer (3-5 cents per cup or an average of $1 per pound) and the price we pay for a cup of coffee ($1-5) is undeniably large. Coffee prices paid to producers were at a 30-year low a couple years back. Currently, coffee is the second most traded commodity in the world, next to oil. And 25 million people are directly involved in coffee production. The repercussions of our actions in regards to coffee-buyi...

In this caffeine-addled corner of the world, the bean and its brew are both blessing and curse, swirled together in a single cup. By Colleen Mastony Chicago Tribune staff reporter March 29, 2007 JIMMA, Ethiopia -- Inside the coffee plant's corrugated metal fence, men look more like mules as they lug 100-pound sacks of coffee on their backs. But as midday nears, a heavenly scent wafts from the corner, where Ahmed Achoumeto, 25, pounds a pile of black coffee beans in preparation for the noontime break. "I am terribly addicted. If I don't get coffee, I can't see properly," he said, standing barefoot in the dirt, grinding the beans with a primitive 3-foot-long wooden pestle and a mortar made of a hollowed tree stump. "Almost everyone here is addicted." Ethiopia is the birthplace of coffee. And in this caffeine-addled corner of the world, coffee is a blessing and a curse swirled together in a cup. Amid the lush hills and misty valleys, peasants endure bleak c...