Students encourage fair trade

from the St. Cloud Times

By Kelly Smith, kmsmith1@stcloudtimes.com

ST. JOSEPH — College students have a reputation of being apathetic and frugal.

But a group of local students is proving to be anything but, spending hours on a project aimed at convincing peers and others to spend a few cents more for a cup of coffee.

It can make a difference for some poverty-stricken Latin American workers, the students say.

The seven College of St. Benedict and St. John's University students sought to expose the workers' conditions. They spent 10 days traveling in Guatemala and more than 600 hours editing 20 hours of footage into a 20-minute documentary.

The film, "Somos de Café," will premiere at 7 p.m. Wednesday at Pellegrene Auditorium at St. John's. An encore screening is scheduled for 7 p.m. Thursday.

The students won't receive class credit or a cent for their work. Instead, they say, they have a mission to show the workers behind the industry.

The project started when seniors Adam Spooner and Brian Essling and junior Andrea Carrow returned last spring from studying abroad in Guatemala.

They were so alarmed by workers' conditions they resolved to make a difference. And to do that, they knew they needed to educate their peers and others in the community about where that cup of coffee comes from.

They joined three other students — senior Andrew Vavra, senior Nate Ptacek and sophomore Fernando Galeano — as a part of an entrepreneurship project to travel back to the source of their inspiration.

Spooner found himself back in the mountainous Guatemalan countryside, riding in a truck on a bumpy, one-lane road to a remote coffee plantation. When he turned to one of the workers and asked in Spanish where he was from, the man didn't list a geographical location. Instead, he said simply: "Somos de café" — we are coffee.

The worker — like many others the students spoke to — have had generations of their families shuffled from plantation to plantation, harvesting coffee for little pay.

The students spent 10 days in January in the Latin American country, interviewing workers and filming the coffee plantations, or fincas.

"There's such a disconnect," Spooner said. "You don't see the workers, the family that depends on the coffee."

He and the others were touched by what they saw, sympathizing with the laborers — mostly women — of a remote, mountainous plantation. The workers earn $13-$26 a year, they said. A fair trade cooperative office helped the students set up the project.

"(The cooperative) just treats them like human beings, whereas other corporations treat them like capital," Ptacek said.

Fair trade products seek to represent marginalized workers and producers — usually farmers in poor communities of Latin America, Africa and Asia — who are underpaid for their labor. In the past six years, fair trade coffee has provided farmers worldwide with about $60 million more than if they had sold to local intermediaries, according to TransFair USA, a third-party certifier of fair trade products.

People's interest has shot up in recent years.

Several places in St. Cloud carry fair trade products, such as Muggsy's Beans, Sam's Club, Good Earth Food Co-op and The Book & Bean Café. Mainstream coffeehouses such as Starbucks and Caribou also sell fair trade coffee.

"They have sacks and sacks just sitting around," said David Slifka about the fair trade farms in Guatemala.

The senior helped produce and edit the film. "The biggest thing they need is a market."

Fair trade commerce includes a variety of products, from fruit to flowers. But coffee is the second most-traded product in the global economy, and thus the focus of the movement.

To be considered fair trade, producers are guaranteed a minimum price for their product.

They must be invested in projects to enhance the development of the community, according to an international certification organization.

"It's worth an extra 30 cents to have that knowledge and peace of mind that they're going to be paid for their work," Ptacek said.

The group brought back 50 pounds of fair trade coffee, selling it on campus and to local businesses for $7 a pound, thus sending back to the workers a 300 percent increase in profits from what they would have made.

Like the simplicity of a cup of coffee, these students have a simple mission: to leave people with a sense of where that cup of coffee you drink really comes from.