Elim Isabel Blandon, a mother of three, is a coffee farmer from Nicaragua, a woman with long, curly black hair and a shy smile, who is trying to improve access to education and health care for women in her village.
If Blandon sells her coffee on the open market, once she pays the costs of transportation, and the “coyote” middlemen get their share, she may earn 40 to 60 cents a pound, barely more than it cost her to grow and ship the crop. If she sells it to Equal Exhange, a for-profit company from Massachusetts that tries to educate North Americans about the economic crisis in the coffee trade, and encourages them to buy what they call “fair trade” coffee — organically-grown, high-quality coffee that’s sold through cooperatives of small farmers, at above-market prices — she earns $1.26 a pound. That’s more than twice the world-market rate, enough to give her at least fragile hope in the future.
In late October, Blandon made her first-ever trip to the United States, traveling with Porfirio Zepeda Arana, who works for a coffee-growing cooperative in Nicaragua, on a trip sponsored by Equal Exchange. Both Nicaraguans have seen firsthand the impact on people from their country when the price of coffee drops too low, when the farmers can barely sell their coffee for more than it costs to grow the beans, when farmers have to leave their land because they can’t afford to stay. Some try to slide into the U.S. as illegal aliens, desperate to find work, Arana said.
“There are kids who end up in the street, homeless,” he said, speaking through a translator at the national offices of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) in Louisville. “There are a lot of folks who are dying of hunger. In reality it is the children who are really affected by it. There are a lot of children who are dying of hunger because they don’t have anything to eat.”
Following the guidance of the 213th General Assembly (2001), the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) has become a partner in Equal Exchange’s Interfaith Coffee Program, along with Lutheran World Relief, the United Methodist Committee on Relief, the Unitarian-Universalist Service Committee, American Friends Service Committee and the Church of the Brethren.
Congregations from those denominations, attempting to bring the realities of global economic development down to a personal level, are trying to do something to help the small coffee farmers by pledging that they will use only fair-trade coffee at church suppers and fellowship hours, by encouraging their members to buy fair-trade coffee for use in their own homes, and by urging churchgoers to ask the coffee shops and restaurants they frequent to serve fair-trade coffee as well. Equal Exchange, a for-profit firm founded in 1986, negotiates directly with cooperatives of farmers who grow coffee, and provides those farmers both access to credit and a guaranteed, per-pound price for the coffee they sell.
So far, more than 5,100 religious congregations and organizations have participated by ordering fair trade coffee, tea or cocoa. Last year, Equal Exchange sold 60 tons of coffee through those partnerships and paid the cooperatives $960,000 in above-market premiums. That money both directly improved the lives of the coffee-growing farmers and was invested in educational, health-care and other community services in their villages, according to Jill Wenke of Equal Exchange.
The PC(USA) participates in the Equal Exchange program through the Presbyterian Coffee Project. Since the Coffee Project’s inception a year and a half ago, 925 of the denomination’s more than 11,000 congregations have participated by buying fair trade coffee, tea or cocoa, as does the PC(USA) national office in Louisville. Churches serve fair-trade coffee during fellowship hours and church dinners (Equal Exchange sells a special “percolator” blend specifically intended for groups using coffeepots big enough to serve a crowd), and youth groups sell it by the pound to raise money for mission trips.
“Folks love it,” said Melanie Hardison, who’s responsible for the Presbyterian Coffee Project and for the three other components of the Enough for Everyone program, the PC(USA)’s effort to involve Presbyterians in global discipleship. “People say this is such an easy thing to do — it’s a no-brainer . . . Since coffee is such an everyday part of our lives, this is a real concrete way Presbyterians can make a difference.”
Arana and Blandon, the Nicaraguans, speak of other things. He describes the coffee farms in the hills of northern Nicaragua — fertile places, with tropical rain forests and cloud forests, where “the harvest is very good” when the weather is good, and “the product is wonderful” because of the conditions. People grow coffee, but also fruit and other crops, diversifying to provide for themselves, using only an organic fertilizer, a fungus that’s carefully applied to the crops. Many of the farmers — some of whose parents and grandparents were also coffee farmers — “really consider this coffee production an art rather than a science,” Arana said, using traditional methods of growing the bean “with the utmost care and tenderness.”
Blandon farms in the Miraflor region of Nicaragua, about 185 kilometers north of Managua, a region of about 4,500 people. Her whole family is involved in farming. “I’ve been living there since I was born,” she said with a proud smile, “and I expect to die there.”
Blandon is a Protestant — an evangelical, she calls it — in an area that’s about 70 percent Roman Catholic. But religion is not a dividing force in her village, Blandon said. Instead, she is trying to develop eco-tourism in her area — bringing in visitors from Nicaragua, the United States, Europe and Asia to learn the techniques for organic coffee production. And she’s working to bring medical care, including gynecological examinations, to women who’ve never had access to such care; some of them are dying of cancer that could have been treated if it had been discovered earlier.
Sometimes women from her village meet, Blandon said, to talk about passages from the Bible “that remind us about the possibility of change.”
In Miraflor, where four of every five farmers participates in Equal Exchange, some of the additional income that program gives is used to support educational, health and other programs for the entire community. And the additional income and the credit that’s available through Equal Exchange is allowing farmers to diversify their crops — growing bananas, avocados and oranges as well, which preserves the richness of the soil and gives farming families more products to eat and to sell.
After Hurricane Mitch devastated coffee fields in Nicaragua in 1998, a group of women was able to obtain a plot of land to farm. Eight of them are working together to grow coffee on the land. One of them, a single mother in her 30s with seven daughters, was diagnosed with cancer but did get treatment, Blandon said. The women harvested their first coffee crop last year and are selling it through Equal Exchange.
“They feel hopeful, but they see commerce as something fragile,” Arana said. “Because they know that that will be what will put food on the table.”
To get more information about the Equal Exchange program, or to order fair-trade coffee through that group, check out www.equalexchange.com.
For information on the Presbyterian Coffee Project, go to www.pcusa.org/pcusa/wmd/hunger/coffee.
