Hundreds of DePauw students drag themselves out of bed in the morning and grab a $1.79, 20 oz. cup of coffee as part of a morning ritual.
The price of that cup generally remains steady day to day, regardless market-altering price changes. Yet, bean price fluctuations create unstable living conditions for coffee farmers — hitting producers in Central and Southern America hardest.
During Wednesday night's "Coffee Commons" panel, four students and two professors addressed issues inherent in coffee production and whether they could be solved by consumers purchasing fair-trade coffee. The Fair Trade USA website describes fair-trade products as those for which the producers are "justly compensated."
About 20 people came to Peeler Art Center's Auditorium to hear the discussion. Junior Katy Strader, a panelist, shared her experience about living in a fair-trade coffee community, Las Marias, El Salvador. The other three students on the panel had either visited El Salvador or Thailand. Other students in attendance had been to coffee communities in Guatemala.
Strader lived in El Salvador for a few months with a host family of seven — soon to be eight. Her host mother picked coffee beans while her husband worked in other realms of agriculture six days a week.
The fair-trade logo is featured on products that meet fair-trade guidelines, which usually focus labor and environmental standards but vary from country to country. The purpose is to make towns like Las Marias more sustainable and facilitate economic growth.
Strader sometimes joined the family to pick the beans — explained as "stripping the branches" — at 3 a.m., walking two or three hours to their plot of land. She remembers, "The youngest in the family, four, was excited to go pick coffee beans for the first time."
The family made, on average, $6 a day.
"The farmers hardly see any profit," said Hannah Harp '10. "It's the merchants who buy it and the people who process it. When 200 pounds of coffee beans sells for $200, while one pound of beans makes 50 cups of coffee, and Starbucks sells their coffee at four dollars a cup, it's hardly a fair cut."
Professors Glen Kuecker of the history department and Alex Puga of the modern languages department also sat on the panel. They were equally skeptical of the fair-trade concept. They said, "Yes, fair trade is better than a raw capitalist market," but they're tired of seeing the fair trade stamp where it doesn't belong.
"Mainstream capitalists see [fair-trade farms] as a threat…" Kuecker said. "Take Starbucks — they say they use fair trade for good marketing, but not even 20 percent of their coffee actually is. They use their own coffee."
With so much confusion surrounding the fair-trade label, some students were led to ask, "How do we know which coffee is really fair trade?"
No one in the room really had an answer other than to know the places where the coffee comes from — like towns with families like Strader's host family.
For example, Kuecker knew of such a town. He supplied the event with fair trade coffee from a small café in Guatemala which had been robbed and collected donations in an effort to reimburse them.
DePauw's source of fair-trade coffee has been Green Mountain Coffee for as long as Steve Santo, general manager of Dining Services, can remember.
"We've been using their Fair Trade coffee for the nine years I've been here," Santo said. "I'd say 90 percent of our coffee, including flavored coffee, is fair trade."
Green Mountain Coffee uses Fair Trade coffee from Mexico and Tanzania.
To the students and professors who attended the event, fair-trade coffee remains an important issue that requires looking beyond the fair trade name.
"People need to know where their coffee comes from," Puga said.