Angela Scionti
Equinox Staff
By the time that Americans clock into their morning shift, chances are that 108.9 million of them had their caffeine fix for the day. However, out of that 108.9 million only about 20 percent of Americans know about Fair Trade, according to a CBS News article. America might be known as the infamous melting pot, but in a caffeine context, America is the figurative coffee pot.
On Wednesday, April 22, in the Madison Street Lounge of the Young Student Center, a film screening sponsored by Fair Trade USA and the Keene State College Fair Trade Club featured the film “After the Harvest.” The film showed the life of the everyday coffee farmers in Central America and the severe struggles they face when their crop plant is not in the harvest season.
The main speaker of the event was Parker Townley, the national organizer for Fair Trade Colleges and Universities. The organization started nearly five years ago when a professor in Wisconsin visited England for a business trip.
“The professor noticed that there was Fair Trade products everywhere on the campus he visited. He being a social justice advocate, the English college staff told him about this movement where students are provided with a road map as a way to bring Fair Trade awareness to the campus and make it part of the culture. The professor then took this idea back to Wisconsin. He worked on it with a number of students and faculty, then declared themselves as a Fair Trade university,” Townley stated. When University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh announced a press release about their declaration of becoming a “Fair Trade University,” it sparked the idea and creation of the organization, Fair Trade Colleges and Universities. The organization came up with five steps for a college or university to be eligible for recognition as a “Fair-Trade College or University.”
The first step is to have a team of individuals who can devote their time to the college or university to promote Fair Trade awareness. The second is to have Fair Trade products on every location that serves food. Step three is to ensure that events and catering in the campus offer Fair Trade products as an option. Step four is Fair Trade education in the institution. Step five is the passing of a resolution that has administrative approval cementing all of the work that the institution has done in its Fair Trade efforts. KSC currently has four of the five steps under its belt in becoming a recognized Fair Trade College. Another speaker at the event, Miguel Mateo, was a Guatemalan coffee farmer and a part of Manos Campesinas. Manos Campesinas “is an umbrella organization that works with eight grassroots organizations of four different Guatemalan geographic departments–San Marcos, Quetzaltenango, Retalhuleu and Sololá. Overall, Manos Campesinas represents 1,073 individual members, all of them small coffee producers,” according to their website. Mateo expressed that the organization has “the power to promote to other countries,” and that “100 percent of production is organic certified.”
“Nearly 2.6 billion people are in poverty and 65 percent are in the farming industry, working under two U.S. dollars or less per day,” Mateo stated in a post-screening powerpoint. Coffee is still not making enough money for people to advance in their lives. The majority of the farmers are paid only once a year. The farmers are then subjected to harsh poverty due to such little pay, which they call, “los meses delgados” (“the thin months”). During the thin months many coffee growers do not make enough money to adequately survive. That is because their cash crop is not in its harvesting season.
Apart from many farmers in the area, Mateo is fluent in English and was able to answer any questions for the audience. Mateo then went on and explained the gold pin that was on his sweater, which he stated represented a small organization called Coordinadora Latinoamericana y del Caribe de Comercio Justo (CLAC). CLAC, which started just last year, is a new identifier for Latin American and Caribbean Network of Small Fair Trade Producers. “CLAC’s mission is to be an organ of representation, coordination, exchange and collaboration for the strengthening of cooperative organizations of small producers from Latin American and the Caribbean within the framework of Fair Trade,” according to the Universities for Fair-Trade website.
Angela Scionti can be contacted at
ascionti@keene-equinox.com