'Fair Trade coffee, please'

Would you consider yourself reckless? Do you drink coffee? If you are reckless and you drink coffee you might be in a lot of danger. I believe there is a continuum of recklessness and we all fall in there somewhere. Some people are intentionally reckless, just waiting to see how bad they can muck stuff up, and then there are others who are extremely cautious and really want everything to be neat and orderly.

For all of the coffee drinkers out there who do not want to be considered to be on the "mucking-stuff-up" side of the continuum, I have an advertorial. I am not totally sure what an advertorial is, but I know the French people who run McDonald's over there recently released an advertorial stating that people really shouldn't eat at McDonald's more than once a week as it is bad for their health (the American people who run McDonald's over here haven't yet concurred with such a statement). Therefore, I am calling this an advertorial as I feel it is of the same magnitude and similar genre as what the French McDonald's people recently announced.

Advertorial: If you drink coffee, make sure you always ask for "Fair Trade," especially in the Frist Campus Center.

Evidently, it is rather reckless to just order coffee these days without thinking about it. "Globalization" may be turning into one of those catchwords that has lost all meaning due to overuse, but it is still very real. Due to the globalization of just about every market on earth, what we buy often has an impact on people we have never met, or sometimes even heard of, half way around the world.

Coffee, like sugar and oil, is priced according to the world market price. This amount varies from year to year and often, coffee farmers have no clue what they will be paid for a crop until it has been sold. The unfortunate result is that farmers often get paid less per pound of coffee than it costs them to produce it. Right now the world market price for coffee is under $0.50/lb.

The good news is that now we have a choice when buying coffee to make sure that farmers receive enough money per pound of coffee to feed and house their families and send their kids to school. After all, if someone is working their buns off they deserve to get paid a decent amount, right?

Fair Trade coffee's first widespread appearance on the market was in Oct. 2000 when 2,300 Starbucks started offering it. Now Fair Trade Certified coffee can be found in supermarkets and coffee shops throughout the country. All Fair Trade coffees ensure that farmers get paid at least $1.26/lb and if the coffee is organic, the growers receive over $1.40/lb.

The translated cost to the consumer is minimal. Usually, each cup of Fair Trade coffee only costs a few pennies more than a standard variety. At the Frist Student Center it is actually 15 cents more, but then again, yogurt costs $1.35.

Make sure to order Fair Trade coffee when you go to Frist's Café Vivian, Starbucks, Small World, Buck's County Coffee, Wild Oats, or any other establishment that gives you the choice. If you aren't given the choice I would challenge you to ask why not.

Examples of places where you aren't given a choice include residential dining halls, eating clubs and Ebeneezer's Coffee; there is also no choice with coffees produced by Kraft, Proctor and Gamble, and Nestlé (who actually do almost half of the coffee business in the United States; Sarah Lee, the other big coffee giant in the U.S., does have a Fair Trade variety).

If the Frist Campus Center can sell 100 cups of Fair Trade coffee a day, this will demonstrate sufficient student interest to justify exploring the possibility of having Fair Trade in all of the dining halls. During the weeks before Fall Break, Frist averaged about 60 cups of Fair Trade a day. So close.

Don't be reckless. Ask for Fair Trade. If you want to learn more about this amazing program, check out www.globalexchange.org or www.transfairusa.org. You can also contact Karen Wolfgang '05 with SPEAC to help out with Fair Trade efforts around campus. Robin Williams is a Wilson School major from Greenboro, NC. He can be reached at awilliam@princeton.edu.