by Jodi Hunley
Daily Lobo
The Fair Trade Initiative, a UNM group advocating better treatment of farmers, said at a meeting on Monday that Aramark would begin serving Fair Trade Coffee on campus as soon as shipments arrived.
Fair Trade coffee will be served at Dane Smith Hall and the SUB tent, said Brandt Milstein, the group’s president. The group is negotiating with Starbucks right now to get them to carry it as well.
“If we can get Starbucks to sell Fair Trade Coffee, it will prove that they are going above and beyond corporate policy,” said Patrick Staib, the group’s vice president. “We would be making a change at a small level. From there we can make headway into the community.”
Initial negotiations with Nathan Dodge, manager of UNM’s Starbucks, ended with Dodge proposing that they have a kickoff event sponsored by Starbucks and begin offering Fair Trade Coffee upon request.
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The board members voted to continue negotiations. They wanted Fair Trade Coffee to be served all day, every day and wanted to incorporate more into the kickoff event.
The Fair Trade Federation is an association of wholesalers, retailers and producers who provide fair wages and employment opportunities to the world’s economically disadvantage farmers.
The costs will not rise at Starbucks if this is implemented but will rise by a couple of cents at other locations on campus, said Milstein.
“We plan to keep on pushing Fair Trade,” Milstein said.
The group is planning tabling campaigns to help spread the message on Fair Trade.
“We like to pose questions and attempt to engage students in a dialogue about exploitative trade practices as a way of gaining academic support,” Staib said.
Other groups are jumping on the Fair Trade bandwagon and the group is receiving many casual inquiries.
“One of my professors keeps asking me when the heck the coffee will be available,” Staib said.
“Every week three to four new people are showing up to meetings or joining the list-serve,” Milstein said.
According to the Fair Trade Coffee Company’s Web site, its business is a revolutionary concept in action. It is a program that brings together the producer and the consumer in a more equitable and meaningful way. The coffee industry middlemen are bypassed and a more direct bridge is built between the producer and the consumer.
Coffee is traded as a commodity in the global market place and is often sold by the growers at a loss. The middlemen in the coffee industry — those that buy and sell coffee endeavoring to maximize their profits — set the price that they will pay to the growers for the coffee, according to the Web site.
The site also states that the growers are typically helpless in the process and are often made to feel lucky to have gotten anything for their coffee at all. Thus, the pickers and growers are taken advantage of by the middlemen.
