fair trade coffee in my neighborhood

One of my local hangouts, Spasso's Cafe on College and Claremont, just went all-fair-trade coffee. Yippee!

Other local (or local-ish fair-trade-coffee joints):
Gaylord's on Piedmont Avenue
The Beanery (or is it the Roastery?) on College and Ashby
Nomad Cafe on Shattuck and 60th? 61st?

Why you really really want to drink Fair Trade coffee:

(From Britain's The Guardian, 2003 - not a lot has changed)

Grinding down Uganda's coffee

John Kafuluzi is sitting on a wooden box outside his adobe hut, surrounded by his family. On John's knee, a listless child, his youngest, just 18 months old, drifts in and out of fevered sleep. She has malaria, as do three of her siblings. Her brother, a couple of years older, has the tight swollen belly of the malnourished.

Inside the hut, just visible through the half open door, an old man is lying on the floor on a thin mattress, the fragile bones of his wasted back rising prominently each time he takes a shallow breath. Peter Kafuluzi, John's father, who has farmed coffee here near Uganda's Lake Victoria for 45 years, is dying but they cannot afford medicine for him. The collapse of the world coffee price has left them without an income.

Our translator is trying to explain to John how much a cup of coffee sells for in a London cafe. "One cup, 5,000 Uganda shillings?" A confused smile flickers across his face, registering disbelief, but then his eyes fill with tears. "No, you mean one kilo, no, no, this is painful to hear. I got only 200 shillings a kilo for my coffee this year." John's eldest sons Bruno and Michael had to drop out of school because the family could no longer afford the small fees. They have been working the fertile red soil all morning instead, although some of the coffee bushes are now neglected. They had hoped to be accountants or doctors and break the cycle of poverty. But all the money they had saved went on medicines last year and they had to sell their cow.

In 1994/5 when the price of coffee was high, Uganda earned $433m from the crop. In 2000/2001, its revenues from coffee slumped to $110m even though it sold more coffee.

The fall in price has not been passed on to the final consumer. So where do all the profits go? An Oxfam report, Mugged, has looked at the chain in detail. Coffee processing is dominated by five transnational companies: Kraft, Nestlé, Procter & Gamble, Sara Lee and Tchibo (which sells mainly in Germany).

At the beginning of 2002, a Ugandan farmer received 14 cents (US) for 1kg of beans. The local middleman who transported it to the mill took 5 cents profit as did the miller, and the cost of transport to Kampala added a further 2 cents, making the cost of the coffee when it arrived at the exporter's warehouse 26 cents. The exporter, operating on a tiny margin, added 19 cents to the kilo, taking the total value of a kilo up to 45 cents. Freight, and the importer's cost and margins took the price to $1.64 by the time it reached the factory of one of the giant roasting companies. But by the time the same kilo was sold in the shops in the form of instant coffee it is was worth $26.40, 7,000% more than the farmer got for it.