The Working Conditions of Coffee Farmers

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Today, coffee is being produced, as well as consumed, all over the world. Coffee is second on the list of the world’s most valuable traded commodity (the first being petroleum).(Global Exchange, 2015) Big coffee corporations are getting rich off of selling coffee, but what about the farmers, the people who actually do the hard labor to produce the coffee? Are they making billions of dollars a year? No. Are they even earning a living wage? Often times, that answer is no.
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That isn’t right. Coffee farmers and producers should be earning a living wage.
Coffee is being produced all over the world, from approximately 25 million farmers and workers in the coffee industry in over 50 countries. (Global Exchange, 2015) From 2010-2012, the top ten coffee producing countries worldwide were Brazil, Vietnam, Indonesia, Columbia, India, Peru, Honduras, Ethiopia, Guatemala, and Mexico. (Statistica, 2012) Approximately 42,471 square miles of farmland in the world is used specifically for coffee production, harvesting, and cultivation. (Global Exchange, 2015) Annual coffee consumption has recently risen to about 12 billion pounds, with the Netherlands being the top consuming country (an average per capita consumption rate of about 2.

41 cups per day(Statistica, 2013))
In the United States, coffee is the largest food import and the second most valuable import. According to the International Coffee Organization, the United States imported 26,093,394 60-kg bags of coffee from 2010-2011(International Coffee Organization, 2015) Importers purchase green coffee from reputable, certified exporters or plantation owners from the countries of production.
Importers are very crucial to the process because many roasters do not have the monetary resources to get their hands on quality green coffee from the countries of production. The importers bring in sell their inventory over time through many small orders from the roasters after they bring in the coffee in large loads. Because so many roasters rely on the services of importers, the importers have a great amount of influence over the types of green coffee available to be sold in the United States.
According to the Global Exchange in 2015, there are currently around 1,200 roasters in the United States. The large roasting companies usually specialize in one recipe which they sell to large retailers. The biggest retailers today are Kraft (which owns Sanka and Maxwell House) and Procter and Gamble (which owns Milstone, Nestle, and Folgers). These companies maintain around sixty percent of the total amount of the green coffee beans (in volume). The other forty percent goes to smaller roasters, or microroasters. The microroasters are those who roast up to five-hundred bags of coffee per year. These microroasters offer what we would call specialty coffee. Roasters have the highest profit margin in the value chain. This makes them a very important link in the long line of the commodity chain. (Global Exchange, 2015)
The next link in the commodity chain is the retailers. Usually the retailers purchase packages coffee from the roasters, however, an increasing number of retailers have begun roasting their own beans. If this keeps occurring, there will be a decrease in need for roasters in the commodity chain.(Global Exchange, 2015) As stated previously, the roasters have the highest profit margin in the value chain. If the role of the roasters is taken away, the retailers would then have the highest profit margin in the value chain, making them arguably the most important link in the commodity chain. Before reaching the consumer, coffee goes through a number of people.
The global commodity chain for involves a long line of producers, middlemen, exporters, importers, roasters, retailers, then finally the consumers. (Global Exchange, 2015) According to Dr. John M. Talbot, 2013, professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of West Indies in Mona, “Most small farmers sell directly to middlemen exporters who are commonly referred to as “coyotes”. These “coyotes” are known to take advantage of small farmers by paying them below market price for their harvests and keeping a high percentage for themselves.” (Talbot, 2013) This is not fair.
These middlemen, or “coyotes”, should not be allowed to take advantage of small farmers in such a way. Talbot goes on later in his article discussing larger coffee estate owners. He argues, “In contrast, large coffee estate owners usually process and export their own harvests that are sold at the prices set by the New York Coffee Exchange. However, extremely low wages, about $2-$3 per day and very poor working conditions for farmworkers characterize coffee plantation jobs.”(Talbot, 2013) That is not a living wage.
The farmworkers should be paid a living wage for the extremely difficult labor that they do. Although things are different economically in the developing nations where this is occurring, I do not believe that one could support a family on two dollars per day. That is simply outrageous. Imagine earning two dollars per day, probably working six days a week. That’s approximately forty-eight dollars a month. How can one purchase food, shelter, and other basic necessities for such a little amount of money? What if they have children? How can you support a family making so little money? I really don’t believe it’s possible. And I certainly don’t believe it’s right. Conditions for workers in the coffee industry are appalling. While it varies between plantations, most workers are paid wages equivalent to those of sweatshop workers. One example of such is in Guatemala.
Coffee pickers there have a one hundred pound quota in order to get their minimum wage of less than three dollars per day. A recent study of plantations in Guatemala by the Guatemalan Commission for the Verification of Corporate Codes of Conduct (2015), showed that over half of all coffee pickers do not receive the required minimum wage, which is in direct violation of the labor laws in Guatemala. (United State’s Department of Labor, 2013)
Other than not being paid fairly, the workers in this study were forced to work overtime without pay, nor did they receive their employee benefits, which are also legally mandated. The average total income reported was $127.37 a month. According to the data published by Guatemala’s National Institute of Statistics, the cost of the “Basic Food Basket” for a family of five was $171.37 a month. (Global Exchange, 2015) As you can already see, there is a large gap here. Keep in mind that this is only the “Basic Food Basket”. The “Basket of goods and Services”, which includes food, education, healthcare, clothing, and transportation, was $312.72 a month. How on earth would anyone working in coffee production in Guatemala be able to afford that?
Many workers are forced to bring their children, some as young as six years old, with them to the field in order to be able to obtain the daily quota. The plantations do not officially employ the children, so they are not subject to any labor protections whatsoever. (Global Exchange, 2015) If the children must accompany their parents into the fields, this means that they are not going to school and getting an education.
Without an education, these children will not be able to get better careers and will probably end up back at the coffee plantation, just like their parents. This vicious cycle will keep repeating itself for many generations to come. How can we prevent such a vicious cycle from continuing any longer? I believe that one of the best ways would be to pay workers a fair and living wage. One way of making sure that the farmers and people working to produce our coffee are earning a living wage is to purchase certified fair trade coffee.
According to lan Bretman of Financial Times, “Coffee certified with the fair trade mark guarantees registered co-operatives a minimum price of Dollars 1.26 per lb for Arabica coffee beans, compared with the world market price of 70 cents per lb. As well as providing a living wage to farming families, the fair trade price also enables them to invest in improved economic and environmental sustainability.” (Bretman, 2004) Many industrialized countries have recently seen their coffee consumers demand justice for coffee workers and farmers.
An example of a way in which they have done this is that they have pressured large coffee retailers, such as Starbucks, to buy their coffee beans directly from cooperative farmers and pay them an actual living wage. In the 2013 Starbucks sourcing report, they list that over between 2012 to 2015, they will have gone from 93% total ethically sourced coffee purchases to 100% in 2015. (Starbucks Coffee Company, 2015) The Fair Trade movement is a “global network of producers, traders, marketers, advocates, and consumers focused on building equitable trading relationships between consumers and the world’s most economically disadvantaged artisans and farmers. It is fundamentally a strategy for poverty alleviation and sustainable development.” (Knox & Marston, 2011)
According to Deborah James, the Fair Trade director of Global Exchange, “Fair Trade offers a mechanism for small farmers to receive higher prices as an alternative to the “tyranny of the C market.” To have their coffeecertified as Fair Trade, importers must satisfy strict international criteria and submit to independent monitoring by TransFairUSA, the new certification agency based in Oakland, California. The most important requirement is a minimum price of $1.26 per pound, paid directly to organized farmer cooperatives–not to middlemen.
Fair Trade importers also must provide farmers with credit at fair terms and commit to long-term trade relationships.” (James, 2000) By cutting out the middlemen and shortening the commodity chain, we can ensure that more of the money goes directly to the ones actually producing the coffee. The commitment to long-term trade relationships will help the farmers and farmworkers feel more secure in their work, because they know they have a working, long-term relationship regarding trade and that they will be paid a fair living wage. However, not all farmers sell to Fair Trade certified markets. Smaller coffee plantations often face at least five barriers to accessing the Fair Trade market. These barriers include certification costs, economies of scale to cover the price of coffee exporting operations, strict requirements regarding quality, and altitude constraints. (Tellman, 2011)
While fair trade clearly isn’t the end all solution to the problems of working conditions and wages of coffee farmworkers, it’s a step in the right direction. It may not solve everything or everyone’s problems, but at least it’s helping a bit. It certainly seems much more silly to go to a coffee shop and purchase a three dollar cup of coffee, knowing that the people producingthe coffee probably earn less than three dollars a day. With that in mind, I urge you to be more conscious of the things we purchase and consume.

Dianne Patton

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