COFFEE WITH PLEASURE
Foreword by Maude Barlow
Coffee With Pleasure is a book about hope, and life, and ethics. It is the story of a cause and of a movement and it builds a bridge of promise to tomorrow for millions of workers and their families around the world.
Free trade is the problem. Fair trade is the solution. Currently world trade is dominated by the ideology of economic globalization--the creation of a single global economy with universal rules set by big business for big business in which a seamless global consumer market operates on free-market principles, unfettered by domestic or international laws or standards. This system of trade is controlled by a handful of transnational corporations operating outside of any domestic law or any international rules except business-friendly trade agreements.
And it is creating deep and entrenched inequalities in its wake.
The combined sales income of the world's top 200 transnational corporations amount to almost twice the annual income of the bottom four-fifths of humanity. Eighty countries have lower per capita incomes today than they did a decade or more ago and 200 million more people this year are living in absolute poverty (less than $1 a day). The world's 225 richest individuals have a combined income equal to the annual income of half of humanity. The world's three richest men--Bill Gates and his two partners in Microsoft--have a combined annual income greater than the combined income of the 48 least developed countries!
The current coffee trade is a perfect example of this corrupt system. A handful of giant agro-food corporations dominate the trade, raking in huge profits and leaving in their wake underpaid workers, chemical pollution and impoverished communities. With every passing year, their grip on the sector tightens and the return to the workers and their families diminishes.
There is an alternative. Growing alongside an awakening global population is the concept of fair trade--that in our role as consumers and coffee lovers, we can build an equitable world trading system, one in which those who toiled to bring us our liquid pleasure work in safe conditions, enjoy democratic rights and provide for their families and their communities.
Coffee With Pleasure is chock full of information; you'll find out all you need to know to become a fair-trade coffee drinker and promoter. But it is also filled with the stories of real people struggling to build a dream. You can almost reach through the pages of this book and touch them. So sit down, pour yourself a cup of deliciously brewed, lovingly made, fairly rewarded fair-trade coffee and dip into this treasure.
You won't be sorry.
Maude Barlow is the National Chairperson of the Council of Canadians and a Director with the International Forum on Globalization
DID YOU KNOW?
- Fair-Trade coffee makes up 5 per cent of the Swiss market and almost 3 per cent of the Dutch market.
- Over 130 brands of fair-trade coffee are sold at 35, 000 outlets in Europe.
- The Canadian Parliament, the Quebec National Assembly and the British Columbia Legislature all serve fair-trade coffee.
- Employees of Cirque du Soleil, Toyota Europe and Warner Brothers New York all drink fair-trade coffee.
- Between 80 and 85 per cent of fair-trade plantations use organic farming techniques.
- Sales of organic products are rising by 20 per cent every year.
- Organically grown coffee holds between 3 and 5 per cent of the U.S. gourmet coffee market.
- Mexico leads the world in organic coffee exports, with 20 percent of the world's production.
- Between 60 and 70 per cent of Mexico's coffee crop is grown in mixed farming operations under forest cover.
- That shade-grown coffee plantations protect the natural habitat of migratory bird species.
- That shade-grown coffee plantations matures more slowly allowing for superior-tasting coffee.