If she doesn’t pick coffee, Fatima has few other options for income.  The tourist trade provides a bit of work for cooks, hotel cleaners and artisans.  Some leave for the cities and the sweatshops, where the pay is $.50 an hour to make clothes destined for Rich World consumers.  D. Radcliff photo

The cost of a cup of coffee

On our Learning Tours to El Salvador, we've spent a morning walking the mountainside with Fatima, an illiterate single mother of four young children. She lives in Las Americas, a village where coffee production is the main source of income for most of the people.

Our walk with Fatima is a morning stroll for us—during the coffee picking season, it is anything but that for her. She's up at the crack of dawn, packs a lunch of tortillas and rice, and goes to her assigned part of the plantation to begin picking. By law, the workers are signed on for 15-day periods, out of which they work 12 days (no work on Sundays—and the owner makes sure to include three). From November to as late as February, they rise early and pick all day. Only the ripe (red) beans are picked off each stem on a bush, so it's a tedious process.

How much do they earn for picking the second most-traded commodity in the world (after petroleum)? They're paid $3 to $5 per 100 pounds, which can take all day. (And lest we think “things are cheaper down there,” a chicken costs $7.00; a pound of beans $1.00.) How much can a coffee shop earn from 100 pounds of coffee? Let's say there are 75 pounds left after roasting: At 60 cups per pound, that's 4500 cups. With an average profit per cup of 75 cents, that makes a grand total of around $3375 from that same 100 pounds of coffee Fatima picked for 1000 times less than that. Annual compensation of Starbucks' CEO: $20 million—or $133,333 per day for a five-day work week with a couple weeks vacation. For 2016, shareholders were paid $1.85 per share of Starbucks stock—so if you owned two shares, you likely made more than Fatima earns in a day.

NCP helps women in Central America and elsewhere get skills training and launch small businesses. This generates income, gives women experience as entrepreneurs, reduces stigmatization by their husbands as 'always needing money,' and develops self-confidence and self-esteem. D. Radcliff photo 2011

When asked about the wages and the way the workers are treated, Fatima responded, “No, it's not fair,” with a look of disdain often seen on the faces of women around the world in similar situations. “I can hardly feed my children and keep them in school. But what choice do I have?

That's what we at NCP call “the economics of desperation”—a job, but not a job with dignity or opportunity.

Why is it like this?

• "Free Trade" is the global economic system that gives priority to products and profit over people and the environment. It tends to make the rich richer and keep the poor powerless.
• Providing a commodity, whether it's coffee or cocoa or cotton, never pays as much as what comes next—the “value-added” stage of preparing the product for market and actually selling it. The US government and other countries actually put a tariff (tax) on imported finished goods (like cloth), while not taxing the raw material (like cotton) so their corporations can be the ones to make the real money.
• Many people in the Poor World are held back due to things like illiteracy or poor health or the lack of access to loans or land.
• US consumers like the idea of Fair Trade—where workers get better pay for their labors and aren't treated badly—but aren't really ready to pay enough to ensure the growers will receive a fair wage. “We want our ethics on the cheap,” writes Fred Pearce in Confessions of an Eco-Sinner.

	Fatima’s daughter Brenda is thinking about dropping out of school to help her mom.  Noble thought, but it will then be much more difficult for her to break the cycle of poverty. D. Radcliff photo

What can we do?

Fair Trade is a positive way forward in helping people in the Poor World have a bigger cut of the action for commodities like coffee or cocoa or clothing. Fair Trade provides a guaranteed base price for producers often above the market price for a commodity like coffee or cocoa. Plus, FT companies work with cooperatives, ensuring community-based decision-making and a level wage scale. Often these companies send some of their profits back to the communities to be used to build schools, etc.

We can also work to help people be successful in their own economies and communities, rather than dependent on international markets. A larger goal can be to reform the global economic system so that people are more important than profits or products.

• Buy Fair Trade as one way to make a positive impact in others’ lives—and help you feel better about yourself and your purchases.
• Support legislation in the US Congress to penalize companies that import products made with unfair labor practices.
• Support efforts by farmers and workers to create local markets so as not to be dependent on the global market, which can be fickle at best and unjust at worst.

  Many work teams or mission groups never meet with community members in the places they work or visit.   That’s a top priority for NCP groups. D. Radcliff photo

• Help women like Fatima have other options by supporting NCP's Give a Girl a Chance fund for girls' education and women's development. How about donating a quarter for every cup of coffee or cocoa you drink to GAGAC—small change may just bring big changes! Get others in your household, office, congregation or school to do the same. One El Salvador Learning Tour participant made a pledge that every 15 days (mirroring the 15-day contracts they work under) she would pray for Fatima and others in Las Americas and donate $5.00 (the amount they earn for picking 100 pounds of coffee) to NCP's work in El Salvador.

• Join one of our Learning Tours to see these things and meet these people for yourself.

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We believe the challenges facing this earth and its people can best be met and addressed by people of courage, conscience and commitment joining together within and between cultures to build a new community of respect for all life.