Bolivia Diaries: Day 4, Part 2 - Coffee!

by: Jill Richardson

Tue Aug 30, 2011 at 21:28:01 PM PDT

Previous diaries can be seen here:

• Day 1, Part 1: The El Alto Market
  
• Day 1, Part 2: Intro to Bolivian Climate and Climate Change
  
• Day 1, Part 3: Intro to Andean Biodiversity
  
• Day 1, Part 4: Potatoes, Quinoa, and the Climate Crisis
  
• Day 2, Part 1: The La Paz Foodshed: The La Paz Market
  
• Day 2, Part 2: The La Paz Foodshed: The Last Agricultural Land in La Paz
  
• Intro to Bolivian Politics
  
• Day 2, Part 3: GMOs and Local Food in Bolivia (FOBOMADE)
  
• Day 2, Part 4: Controversial Highway Through the Jungle (TIPNIS)
  
• Day 3: Agriculture in Chicani, A La Paz Suburb
  
• Day 4, Part 1: The Death Road
  
• Day 4, Part 2: Coffee!
  
• Day 5, Part 1: Coca
  
• Day 5, Part 2: A Biointensive Garden
  
• Day 6: An Indigenous Village on Lake Titicaca (Santiago de Okola)
  
• Day 7: Santiago de Okola
  
• Day 8, Part 1: Festival in Cochabamba - Morenada
  
• Day 8, Part 2: Festival in Cochabamba - Morenada
  
• Day 8, Part 3: Festival in Cochabamba - Tinku
  
• Day 8, Part 4: Festival in Cochabamba - Caporales
  
• Day 8, Part 5: Festival in Cochabamba - Street Food

You can also find diaries from my 2010 trip to Bolivia here.

The New Coffee Crisis

by: Jill Richardson

Tue Jan 04, 2011 at 12:57:26 PM PST

For farmer co-ops at this moment, the challenge is more immediate. As local middlemen are willing to buy coffee for prices at or above what FT roasters and importers are willing to pay, they are gaining a foothold on local coffee markets. This inevitably weakens farmer cooperatives as growers sell outside the co-op and co-ops are in turn unable to deliver on coffee contracts with buyers.

To give you some background, recall that part of a Fair Trade agreement means forming a coffee growers cooperative to sell your coffee through. This is, of course, in many ways a good thing for the growers. But back several years ago when coffee prices hit rock bottom and Fair Trade prices were significantly higher than what a coffee grower could otherwise get, there was much more reason for the growers to actually sell through their cooperatives. Now, with high prices and a relatively small fair trade premium, the incentive is smaller.

What the Just Coffee article doesn't mention is that the "middlemen" (coyotes) outside of the fair trade system pay the growers immediately for their beans. You hand over the beans and they hand you cash. A cooperative might not pay the growers until much later. So even if Fair Trade offers a modest premium to the growers, the value of cash in their hand immediately might still lure them to sell to a coyote.

Just Coffee says:

At this point the challenge to the fair traders is one that should be embraced. For too long fair trade marketing has focused almost exclusively on the increased prices paid to farmers. Now we must focus on the other components of the FT philosophy such as pre-financing, long-term relationships, and other forms of cooperation while also staying above the world price. This will most certainly create a challenge for "low bar players" who have maximized their marketing based on the higher prices that they paid to growers, but who also have not generally delved very deeply into the pieces of FT that go beyond their dollars.

They then go on to address yet another challenge - the climate crisis. Strange weather patterns have played a role in the decrease of supply (and devastating losses to growers) and increase in coffee prices lately. Will that continue? Or get worse? To me, the climate crisis is the real problem here. Prices so high that a fair trade program isn't needed is a blessing - if they last. But if the prices are only high because the coffee growers are having their crops wiped out, that's a problem. A big problem. Especially if weather patterns remain like this or get worse.

Chiapas Diaries: Day 4, Part 1 - Zapatista Agriculture and a Shower

by: Jill Richardson

Thu Dec 02, 2010 at 06:00:00 AM PST

Previous diaries in this series:
Day 1, Part 1: My Yuppified Introduction to Chiapas
Day 1, Part 2: An Introduction to Zapatistas
Day 2, Part 1: Something's Weird in Zapatista Territory
Day 2, Part 2: Our First Day with the Zapatistas
Day 3, Part 1: A Full Day with the Zapatistas in the Highlands
Day 3, Part 2: A Trilingual, Multicultural Corn Experiment

(I went with the group Schools for Chiapas, an organization that works with and provides aid to the Zapatistas. Check out their website if you are interested in either traveling with them to Chiapas yourself, or simply buying some artisanal goods or coffee produced by Zapatistas. Aside from the obvious politics involved in supporting Zapatistas, you are supporting human beings who live in extreme poverty and work their asses off to educate themselves and their children and provide for basic needs like water and health care.)

Chiapas Diaries: A Fourth Attempt at Tropical Travel

by: Jill Richardson

Thu Nov 18, 2010 at 22:11:37 PM PST

On the Road Again...

by: Jill Richardson

Mon Nov 15, 2010 at 23:15:32 PM PST

That happened 2 Sundays ago. He was getting ready for a trip to Chiapas over Thanksgiving, and wanted me to come along. I was interested but leaning toward saying no. I was actually dead set on saying no until my trip to Cancun for the climate summit (which I was starting to feel lukewarm about anyway) fell through. At this time, I was already deeply in debt from putting Bolivia on my credit card, and I did not know yet that my rabies treatment bills would exceed $3000 or that I had forgotten to pay my October car payment. And I was "on the verge" of starting a well-paying software consulting job, one that still might eventually happen but sure isn't happening quickly. As soon as the job started, I'd have no time for travel but plenty of money. I figured I better head to Chiapas soon, but I planned to go at New Years with a Global Exchange trip.

Then Peter started telling me about his organization (Schools for Chiapas) and about the trip. And... wow. He was going for the corn and coffee harvest, and to help with a new diabetes epidemic that had caused some deaths recently. In addition to that, there would be a workshop on a native, stingless bee (the melipona) whose numbers are in decline. The trip would finish up with a visit to ancient Mayan ruins. (And I've had a "thing" for the Mayans since about 5th grade, when my class studied them... ok, I'm a dork.)

So I'm going. We are leaving on a red-eye from Tijuana Thursday night and arriving in Chiapas on Friday morning. My brother died over Thanksgiving 2 years ago, so to be honest, the further I can get myself away from celebrating, the better. This will be great. I'll be doing something meaningful during this difficult time of year for me, and from what Peter's told me (which is a lot more than I've written here), this is going to be INCREDIBLE. I probably won't have internet while I'm in Mexico, but unless the mosquitoes eat me, I'll be back with lots of stories to tell on November 29.

Bolivia Diaries: Day 7, Part 6 - This is Where Coffee Comes From

by: Jill Richardson

Sat Oct 30, 2010 at 15:00:00 PM PDT

On our seventh day of the trip, we drove through a coffee-growing region. This is a just simple photo diary with pictures of the town.

My trip was organized by Global Exchange and Food First. You can find out about future Food Sovereignty tours at the link.

Fair Trade Coffee Recommendation

by: Jill Richardson

Mon Mar 01, 2010 at 19:12:00 PM PST

I told them I wanted to buy a few pounds of coffee, and then asked their recommendations for which kind to get. The entire staff broke out in unanimous gushing over the Ethiopia Yirgacheffe. They said it's the best crop they've ever gotten. So I got a bag of it. And... it's fantastic. It's a light roast and it's absolutely delicious coffee. Plus, the growers were paid $2.62 per pound, which is significantly above the Fair Trade minimum price.

If you want to buy it online at Just Coffee's site, go to Purchase and then navigate to the third page of coffees. The coffees are listed alphabetically and the Yirgacheffe is last.

How Fair is Fair Trade Coffee?

by: Jill Richardson

Tue Feb 23, 2010 at 11:16:01 AM PST

Fortunately, this was not the case. What I found is that, in general, Fair Trade is a good thing. How good depends on where you buy your Fair Trade coffee from. I wrote this up on Alternet in a recent article called "Does Fair Trade Coffee Lift Growers Out of Poverty or Simply Ease Our Guilty Conscience?" I invite you to take a look at it, but I can sum up my recommendations on choosing a Fair Trade coffee here:

1. If you already buy specialty coffee (i.e. not Maxwell House or Folgers), then it won't cost you extra to buy Fair Trade. The Fair Trade prices I examined - even from roasters who pay growers well above the Fair Trade price - was no higher than prices charged by Starbucks for non-Fair Trade coffees.

2. Buy from a roaster that ONLY sells Fair Trade, not from one who sells only a fraction of their coffee as Fair Trade.

3. If you really want to know how strong a roaster's commitment to Fair Trade is, check their website. The most committed Fair Trade roasters actually visit their growers and often post pictures of them on their websites. They are very familiar with the growers' quality of life as well as the impact we have on them - and they likely care deeply about this.

4. Some Fair Trade roasters actually pay more than the Fair Trade minimum price. One example of this is Just Coffee in Madison, WI (and they also make great coffee!). Each bag of coffee lists how much the grower was paid on it, and their website breaks down the price of their coffee so that you know how much goes to the grower vs. what it costs to print the label, roast the coffee, cover the roaster's overhead, etc.

My Visit to Equal Exchange

by: Jill Richardson

Tue Aug 25, 2009 at 21:33:08 PM PDT

Equal Exchange is a company I have personally bought products from in the past (both chocolate and coffee), and I'm certainly an advocate of Fair Trade products. However, I'd prefer to continue advocating for ethical business models and sustainable practices without endorsing specific companies in exchange for a bit of free food. That wouldn't be honest to blog readers, and it probably wouldn't even make for very interesting blog content. On the other hand, we do need businesses like Equal Exchange as part of our movement, both because they provide us with Fair Trade products (so we can eat cocoa and know it wasn't harvested by child slaves) and because we want businesses weighing in on our side of political issues.

That said... here are a few pics and some details on my visit with Equal Exchange.

Sampler Platter

by: Jill Richardson

Sun Apr 26, 2009 at 21:38:38 PM PDT

• In a poll, people say yes to subsidies for small farmers, and no to subsidies for large farmers.

• My new favorite school lunch blog gives us an update on school food legislation.

• Bonnie at Ethicurean tells all about the Kellogg Food and Society conference I attended last week.

• Coca-Cola denied human rights abuses in China at its annual stockholders' meeting. But this brings up an interesting point - one I've been meaning to discuss here for a while. Shareholders have power to make companies reform - that's what happened to McDonald's earlier this year when shareholders extracted a promise from the company to cut pesticide use in its potatoes.

• Here's a fantastic interview with Curt Ellis of King Corn fame. I got to meet him last week. I was very impressed.

• Check out this article on planting trees in Anacostia, a poor neighborhood in Washington, D.C. I got all excited when I read the title, and then realized once I read the article that they weren't talking about fruit trees. But that's OK. Any trees at all are better than no trees, even if they don't produce food.

• Another terrific article about chickens by one of my favorite farmers, Carol Ann Sayle. She writes about Austin's Funky Chicken Coop Tour.

• Here's an absolutely fantastic not to miss post about Food Inc, the new documentary coming out in a few months. By the way, the blog that posted the terrific article on the film is a blog for another upcoming documentary on food, The Greenhorns, a film about young farmers. Last week I met the incredible Severine Fleming, the film's directors. I definitely recommend checking out her blog and her film.

• Here are instructions for using coffee grounds as fertilizer.

• Want to see a scary animation showing how quickly animals are killed in a slaughterhouse? Check this out.

Sampler Platter

by: Jill Richardson

Mon Apr 20, 2009 at 12:00:00 PM PDT

• Don't miss this fantastic article about Stanford University's farm.

• Not too miss for entirely different reasons: The Food Chain according to the Simpsons. If you'd just add some arrows of corn and soy pointing to all of the animals, it would be the food chain according to America.

• When I was reading an article on urban farms in Austin, TX on The Atlantic, I started to get a funny feeling. This farm sounded awfully familiar. It couldn't be Boggy Creek, could it? I looked at the author's name... Carol Ann! It IS Boggy Creek! Hooray! The Atlantic couldn't have picked a nicer and more wonderful farm to feature. I especially recommend checking out their tales from the henhouse, narrated by Aunt Penny the hen.

• Here's a graphic that will make JayinPortland proud: a map showing Breweries per Capita. Oregon as a state does quite well, but Portland itself has the most breweries total AND per capita of any U.S. city.

• A self-watering garden is a cool idea but I do wonder about the wisdom of using PVC pipes. Isn't PVC supposed to be "poison plastic" because of the phthalates in it?

• Florida will be home to the U.S.'s first solar powered city. What took the Sunshine State so long to think of such an idea?

• Bon Appetit has a new carbon calculator for food. Time to stop counting carbs and start counting carbon!

• Ezra Klein asks "Why shouldn't we tax soda?"

• Washington Post says more babies are eating homemade food.

• The Internet Food Association is talking about cold brewed ice coffee, one of my favorite treats EVER... and one that I rarely find and coffee shops. Fortunately, they include a recipe. Mmmm.

Jill's Guide to Flavored Coffee

by: Jill Richardson

Sat Apr 04, 2009 at 14:24:52 PM PDT

Spiced Coffee: Add a little bit of cinnamon with your coffee grounds before brewing. I've also tried adding allspice and nutmeg, and I wouldn't mind giving ginger and cloves a go too. But be warned about nutmeg and cloves - a little goes a looong way so a tiny bit is enough.

Vanilla Coffee: Add a little bit of vanilla extract to the carafe before brewing your coffee. Mmm.

I also wouldn't mind trying out a tiny bit (1 tbsp?) of Cointreau or Amaretto in coffee. I've used them in hot cocoa with great results. And, sad to say, I still haven't figured out how to get that yummy hazelnut flavor into my coffee. Perhaps roasted, ground hazelnuts added to the coffee grounds would work, but I'm not sure I'm willing to try it. For some reason I really like hazelnut flavored coffee but I absolutely can't stand hazelnuts.

UPDATE: See the comment by Zic below. She recommends NOT adding spices directly to your grounds. Instead, try stirring your coffee with a cinnamon stick or use essential oils.

Why Do We Need Fair Trade Coffee?

by: webuyitgreen

Fri Aug 22, 2008 at 08:50:49 AM PDT

By WeBuyItGreen: promoting green living and fair trade

This is the first in a five-part series of articles that compare three alternatives to the traditional coffee trade industry:  fair trade, direct trade, and Starbucks' C.A.F.E. program.  However, before we compare these three alternatives to one another, let's take a look at why fair trade coffee was created in the first place.  What conditions in the traditional coffee industry have created the need for fair trade, or some alternative that resembles it?