around the world in 180 days

Ok, Justin, since you asked so politely, here is my fair-trade rant.

Picking coffee is hard work. We spend 1/2 day doing it and it was fun, but believe me, it was nice to be done and back at Bartola’s for a nice big lunch. We picked a relatively small plot of land and got bug bites, scratches and very tired. People who pick coffee for a living don’t get to stop at noon. Often, they don’t get to stop after 8 hours and they don’t get paid minimum wage, either. They pick and they pick and they pick, for 12 hours a day, every single day, for almost nothing, just so they can feed their kids. It’s a tough life, but what are they going to do? Starve to death?

Of course not. They work, just like you or I or anyone else. This is where fair trade coffee comes in. Fair trade coffee is coffee sold at a price that allows workers to stop working after 10 hours instead of 12 (I made the numbers up, but you get the idea). Fair trade allows coffee pickers to earn a living, spend some time with their family and enjoy their life.

Sure, there’s probably a million cold economists out there who will say that the free market has decided that a coffee picker’s labor is only worth so much and too frickin’ bad if that ain’t enough to raise a family. Don’t pick coffee, right? Well, that’s not a choice for a lot of people. It’s pick coffee for slave wages or starve.

So, at least to me, it’s worth a couple extra bucks a pound of coffee to know that I’m not exploiting some poor schmuck who’s been exploited all his life. In the US, $2 isn’t much, but in places like Guatemala, it’s a fortune. It’s your decision, but next time you reach for that can of folgers, THINK OF THE CHILDREN!! WHY WON’T YOU THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!!!!

Tags: Travel

This entry was posted on Monday, February 26th, 2007 at 2:17 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.