Coffee is one of the hottest commodities on the planet. The kind you buy and drink can make or break villages all over the world that are threatened by huge corporations operating under the misleading banner of Free Trade. Fair trade coffee saves lives.

Five hundred billion cups of coffee are consumed every year and the price paid for a only a single cup in the United States exceeds half the daily income of many small farmers.

Read this one story and you’ll realize that coffee is a very personal business for many people…

I am a third generation coffee farmer, born and raised in Guatemala. My origins in coffee go back to the 1930’s when my grandparents Felix and Rosalia sold their most precious possessions, a horse and cow, to buy a small amount of land to grow coffee. The son of a Spaniard and a local woman, my grandfather grew up very poor. He did not wear any shoes until he was older and never learned how to write or read. He worked really hard and bought several small pieces of land to cultivate the coffee that he named Finca Morelia. He helped a lot of people along the way and was the first person in town to own a motor vehicle, a run down pick up truck. People would come day or night knocking on his door when they would get sick and he would kindly drive them trough the dirt roads to the nearest clinic or hospital, usually a couple of hours away. The name of the town is La Industria, a small village of approximately 2,000 small coffee farmers located in the mountains of the state of San Marcos, near the Pacific Ocean.

Through my grandfather’s kind and visionary leadership the town grew and developed, until the terrible civil war came. Things turned really rough with several village neighbors getting killed and many others “disappeared.” Many people fled the village escaping the violence and destruction, including many of my family members. The coffee farms were abandoned for a long time and my grandfather passed away in 1993, almost as poor as when he started but loved by the whole town.

My family moved to Guatemala City and several years ago my mother Coni, one my grandfather’s 10 children, decided that it was time to begin cultivating the land that my grandfather loved and worked his whole life. So she went back to La Industria and began cleaning the farm. She prepared the land and planted new coffee trees. After a couple of years harvest time came again. My mother, sister and my father’s dad began picking the ripe beans even under the unexpected heavy rain of an unseasonably warm October. They took the bags, full with red coffee beans, on their shoulders and walked along the hilly roads that lead to the main town. Having arrived at a local buyer, they anxiously waited to see how much they would be compensated for their hard work while the man in charge placed the heavy bags on the scale.

I was working as a doctor at Saint Louis University at that time and had no direct involvement with the process, except for the continuous moral support to my mom. I gave her a call one night when she got back to Guatemala city as they had no telephones in La Industria then. When I asked her how much she got for her beans she started crying and told me she got the equivalent of 14 cents for a pound of coffee beans. Sad and angry tears rolled from my eyes. I could not help to think of my grandfather working all his life raising 10 kids on this kind of revenue. Then I thought of the entire village and how hard they worked all year, how proud they were of their coffee and yet no hope of improving their living conditions.

Fourteen cents of a dollar per pound! No wonder why people are leaving the town and migrating to the north in hope for a better future. Our village is not the only one to be affected by this phenomenon; there are thousands and thousands of little coffee fincas owned by small coffee growers that are being affected by this.

That’s when I got involved; I knew I had to do something about it. I began investigating the coffee market and figuring out ways out of this poverty cycle. I looked into getting certified by Fair Trade and traveled to Belgium and met with some representatives of the European Fairtrade Federation, unfortunately it did not seem like a viable option for us or for many small coffee growers who share in our dilemma….

READ THE REST OF THIS STORY HERE ON THE BEANS FOR HOPE WEBSITE

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