IN DEVELOPMENT
Change is a Brewing
Greentreks embarks on Sustainable Coffee Campaign
Philadelphia, PA, March 18, 2004
Need your daily fix of Joe every a.m. and
find yourself willing to pay through the nose? Don’t
worry, you’re not on your own:
• Coffee is the world’s second most
traded commodity (after oil).
• More than 400 billion cups of coffee are
consumed each year in the United States alone.
• American consumers regularly shell out over
$3 for a cup at one of the nation’s thousands
of specialty cafes.
Business is booming if you’re into coffee — at least
it is if you call North America or Europe your home. Sadly,
there’s much more to the story: from environmental devastation
to coffee growing communities in crisis, our caffeine obsession
has implications that affect nearly every part of the world.
The award-winning GreenTreks team is tackling the coffee conundrum
by seeking out and sharing personal stories of the people involved
in the bringing coffee from bean on the shrub to brew in the
home. Our first research trip is underway: Senior Producer Maria
Erades and Director of Photography Gerry Hooper are currently
in Nicaragua, visiting CECOCAFEN, a coffee growers cooperative
outside of Matagalpa, and will be in Costa Rica next week. Check
out their first shots from the field.
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The United States consumes one-fourth of the world’s coffee
supply. Roasters, wholesalers, and retailers are making a fortune
from the public’s unquenchable thirst, but a glut in the
commodity market has driven prices paid to growers to an all-time
low. The average wage earned by the world’s 25 million
coffee producers is $3 a day, less than it costs to plant and
harvest their crops. As a result, small coffee farmers are:
• Out of work,
• Losing their land, and
• Foregoing essentials like family health
and education while toiling for poverty pay.
Traditionally, coffee has been grown on small farms situated
under the canopy of tropical forests. Over the past couple of
decades, high yield “sun grown” coffee cultivated
on large plantations and reliant on fertilizers and pesticides
has flooded the marketplace. The environmental changes have
been devastating: Besides deforestation, impacts have ranged
from severe erosion to polluted water to long-term effects on
populations of migrating birds.
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Fortunately, there is good news and plenty of reason for hope.
Throughout the tropics, coffee growers are foregoing sun grown,
going organic, returning to traditional ways. In North America
and Europe, roasters, distributors, and specialty shop owners
are supporting coffees grown in socially and environmentally
responsible ways, and these products (with labels such as “Organic,
“Shade Grown”, “Fair Trade”, and “Bird
Friendly”) are available more widely than ever before.
GreenTreks Sustainable Coffee Campaign will bring television
viewers, web visitors, magazine readers, and coffee shop goers
into the personal lives of the people who are the links in the
coffee chain and introduce them to the challenges these people
face. The goal of our effort is to increase awareness of, and
demand for, sustainable coffee. Ultimately, it is meant to demonstrate
that individual action can indeed have a profound effect — and
to get you involved in making positive change.
Stay tuned, there’s much more to come.
• Please keep me informed as you
develop your Sustainable Coffee Campaign. I
want to sign up now to get email updates.
• I’d love to help spread the word about
Sustainable Coffee. Please
send me more info on what I can do.
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