The following excerpt is from an article published on September 25, 2009 by TIME. To read the article in its entirety, please click here.
By Ezra Fieser / Quetzaltenango
Ever since Jesuit monks brought coffee to Guatemala three centuries ago, raising the beans has been a losing business for small farmers. Conditions are miserable — try lugging 100 lb. of fertilizer up a mountain — and even though coffee is the world’s second most valuable traded commodity, after oil, the money it brings in is measly. “It’s not enough to live on,” says Luis Antonio, who has grown coffee near Quetzaltenango, in Guatemala’s western highlands, for three decades but gets deeper in debt each year. “What we earn isn’t enough to buy food for our children.”
Antonio and the world’s 25 million other small coffee growers don’t have a lot of career alternatives. So you’d think they would be enthusiastic about Fair Trade — a global campaign that for 25 years has sought to bring struggling Third World farmers, including Antonio, out of poverty by paying them higher-than-market prices for everything from coffee to quinoa. Along the way, it has recruited retail giants like Starbucks, which is the globe’s largest purchaser of Fair Trade — certified coffee.
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