The Project

We at Just Haiti aim to build an equitable and fair partnership between coffee consumers in North America and coffee growers in Haiti. Our goals are for the growers to not only grow high-quality specialty coffee but also to own—and profit from—all post-harvest operations required to export and sell their coffee to North Americans.

Coffee is the world's second most valuable commodity—after crude oil. And as with oil, the United States imports and consumes more coffee than any other country, accounting for one-fourth of all coffee imports. Around the globe, the annual consumption of coffee has expanded to more than 12 billion pounds, and continues to grow every year.

Fair-trade-plus

Just Haiti ensures that coffee growers in Baradères receive, up front, the current fair trade price for their harvests. This will help them to achieve a decent living standard. But we go further.

Coffee roasters have the highest profit margin in the coffee business. So our ultimate goal is for the Baradères growers' association, the Café Développement Baradères (CDB), to own and operate the entire business, including roasting and marketing. This will enable CDB farm families to reap the full economic value of their harvest—and their labor.

This approach—"fair trade plus"—will enable the families to gain access to better food, health care and education and to contribute to strengthening the entire Baradères community. We also aim to help CDB expand the number of member growers to the extent possible.

Fair-trade-plus will also help sustain the growers' capacity to protect the environment. Most of Haiti has been deforested. In the past the country's forests were relentlessly exploited for slow-growing native mahogany. Today, the mahogany—and the forests—are virtually gone in many areas. Yet the remaining forests are still being exploited—at an unsustainable rate—for wood products and to make charcoal as fuel for cooking.

Today's growers of organic, shade-grown coffee, such as the family farmers we are working with in Haiti, use sustainable techniques that maintain forests and their diversity. These techniques include composting the coffee pulp, growing compatible crops alongside the coffee and avoiding chemical pesticides and fertilizers.

If the Haitian growers of shade-grown coffee are able to survive and expand their operations, there can be new, sustainable hope for the country's ailing environment.

Coffee originated in Africa as a crop grown in the shade of many kinds of trees. The trees anchored an incredibly rich ecosystem of plant and animal life above and in the soil—from microbes and moss to monkeys and moths.

Centuries ago, European colonial powers developed coffee as a trade commodity in the Tropics. Slaves, serfs or wage laborers grew the crop on big plantations. While slavery has been abolished, most coffee is still an unjust brew. In all, about 20 million farmers and workers in more than 50 countries labor to produce coffee. In the Western Hemisphere, Haiti is the poorest of those countries.

Prices paid to growers fluctuate, but as recently as 2004 the average was a measly 42 cents per pound. Currently, the price is about a dollar, but most small farmers sell to middlemen exporters. "Speculators," as they are called in Haiti, are known to exploit small farmers by paying them below-market prices, sometimes as little as half.

The world's small farmers earn about $500-$1,000 a year on a typical coffee acreage of less than about 7 acres. In Haiti the farms are even smaller.

While most small coffee farmers receive prices below the cost of production that force them into a cycle of poverty and debt, owners of large coffee estates typically process and export their harvests at prices set by the New York Coffee Exchange.

Estate farmworkers are generally paid very low wages ($2-3/day) and working conditions are poor. In Guatemala, for example, Kim recently visited a coffee plantation where coffee pickers must meet a 100-pound quota to get the minimum daily wage—less than three dollars. The owners told her this is typical, and they have to keep wages low to be competitive.

To meet the daily quota, many workers bring their children to help them in the fields. These child workers are not officially employed and therefore not subject to labor protections.

In the 1970s and 80s, in order to increase yields, well-meaning international financial institutions provided tens of millions of dollars to coffee plantations around the globe to replace traditional shade grown farming techniques with 'sun cultivation' techniques. This type of industrial coffee farming produces very high yields of low quality coffee, and is what has depressed worldwide coffee prices, leading to low wages on shade-grown plantations and often putting small farmers out of business. It has also caused severe environmental problems, such as pesticide pollution, deforestation and the extinction of songbirds through habitat destruction. The Smithsonian Institute has identified industrial coffee production as one of the major threats to songbirds in the hemisphere due to deforestation, because the birds no longer have a habitat in which to live (details). Most of the low-priced coffee we buy in our grocery stores is produced using these techniques.

Fair-trade pricing has helped some growers; the fair trade price now is about $1.25 per pound. But when was the last time you paid anywhere near that for fair trade coffee? The difference is the cost of—and profit from—processing, roasting, packaging, shipping and marketing. That's the difference Just Haiti will help the Haitian growers recover.

For more information:

• www.globalexchange.org
• www.ico.org
• www.nationalzoo.si.edu (search birds and coffee)
• www.coffeejazz.com

Just Haiti works to alleviate poverty, hunger, violence, illiteracy and disease in Haiti by fostering small-business development, education programs, employment opportunity, infrastructure improvement and environmental quality. Just Haiti is a Section 501(c)(3) tax-exempt charitable organization.

Copyright 2007-2010 Just Haiti, Inc.