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The Café Campesino e-newsletter has emerged from the bottomless cup! Our search and rescue team, including our friends at Starstruck Design, has revived our monthly publication. If our hiatus has caused a coffee buzz withdrawal, we apologize, but we’ve been submerged in a growing fair trade market. But now we're back, serving up a monthly cup of Café Campesino news and information we hope you'll enjoy. The following staff notes capture past year highlights…read on!
Our bustling Americus international headquarters continues to be a hive of swarming activity. Now that I think back, so much has happened in the last year, it's hard to summarize it all in
Reader's Digest form. But the domain of Café Campesino and Cooperative Coffees, two companies with distinctly separate missions but inseparable by trade, has entertained Bill, me and a handful of other dedicated team members over the twelve-month stretch. Our constant whirlwind of activity has prompted the acquisition of a couple of additional office chairs (without missing parts) and a few framed Chiapan folk art wall-hanging pieces, as well as production room renovation completed by two amateur carpenters whose technique was gleaned from watching episodes of "The New Yankee Workshop."
Aside from the physical changes in our office, Café Campesino’s activity over the past four seasons has produced growth on many other fronts – more producer group relations, a new label release, an expanded retail line including
hand-crafted coffee mugs, and another local community pilot project (pre-labeling our coffee bags), which generates revenue for our local school for the mentally and physically-challenged. Our long-term supporters would express this progress as exponential growth, while our current customers would agree that these exciting developments are only the beginning.
Experiencing small-business volatility, expanding a novel Fair Trade market, and exercising social activism takes the dexterity of a puppeteer. To tame the loose ends, we added two players to our Café Campesino cast: Rosemary and Maria. Both much better Spanish speakers than Bill and me, they quickly improved our customer service – impacting both our front-end and back-end operations. Better serving customers and answering more consumer inquiries = further opportunities. The doors to other alternative trade forums are beginning to open for us here in Americus and beyond.
Recently, we established prominence in the Atlanta natural foods market with shelf space at
Sevananda, a community-owned cooperative. As an advocating outreach team, Café Campesino has transformed recreational festivals into Fair Trade chat grounds. Bicycle festivals have been a proven haven for Café Campesino conversations. Serving the desired cup at BRAG and at the Mount Dora Bike Festival, we not only engage consumers on Fair Trade issues, but also discuss the platform of alternative transportation.
Each month in this Fair Grounds e-newsletter, beside sharing our news, we'll invite an ever-growing network of fair traders to promote alternative grounds, showcase fair viewpoints from consumers (like you!), and offer a voice to producers who trade on fair grounds. We hope you find this publication as invigorating as the taste of Café Campesino Fair Trade Coffees. ENJOY!
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In
honor of Earth Day (Earth Week?), we look at how the
sustainable environmental practices of several of our producing
partners continue to result in the fine Café Campesino
coffee you know and love!
Ethiopia — In the fall of 2001, we introduced
Ethiopia Limu and it quickly became one of our best
selling coffees. Ethiopia is the homeland of all coffee
and is still found growing in a wild state under the shade
of the rainforest of the southwestern Ethiopian highlands.
Several years ago we met representatives of the Oromia
Coffee Farmers Cooperative Union, or OCFCU, as they
visited the United States looking for direct markets.
Several members of our importing organization, Cooperative
Coffees, recently visited these farmers and reported that
they have never witnessed a better example of fair trade
at work, nor have they ever seen as much need for this
form of trade partnership that allows the farmer to earn a
just wage for their harvest.
For
more on Ethiopia, plus news from the harvest season in
Sumatra and Nicaragua, click here:
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| Ahh…it's a mighty heady feeling to participate in something that reconfirms the values you hold near and dear. And that's just what happened when Bill and I ventured to Washington, DC, in early April for the Fair Trade Federation Conference. More than 125 folks from all around the country, including producers, importers, wholesalers, retailers and concerned citizens came to American University to hear speakers and attend sessions on fair trade, sustainability and globalization. Being purveyors of fairly traded coffee, the Café Campesino team is always keenly interested in spreading the fair trade message, but we sometimes forget that many others are "on the bus" with us in this effort. So it was extremely gratifying to have the opportunity to discuss, brainstorm, and share tactics with individuals who are as committed as we are to fair, mutually-beneficial trade with partners in developing countries.
To
read more about Daniel's adventures at the conference as
well as Bill's lobbying experience on Capitol Hill, click here:
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On
Earth Day, we received this suggestion from Angela Faye
Martin, who has been enjoying Café Campesino coffee at
home and work for two years:
"When a bag of Café Campesino coffee is finished in
my home, all I do is rip off the twist-tie and dispose of
the bag sustainably in my lidded kitchen compost bucket.
Because the bag is composed of biodegradable material, it begins the process of
becoming my garden soil as soon as it gets to my outdoor
compost bin. The aforementioned twist-tie becomes a
re-useable addition to my utility drawer providing me with
a way to close plastic bags for lunches. Join me in
reducing your net landfill contribution and improve your
quality of life and gardening pleasure."
Thanks,
Angela. If you've got a coffee tip to share, please e-mail
us at feedback@cafecampesino.com.
We'll be happy to feature it in an upcoming edition of Fair
Grounds.
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| BRAG Spring
Tune-up in Eatonton, GA – Over 700 cyclists poured into the sleepy, middle Georgia town of Eatonton last weekend to participate in the Bicycle Ride Across Georgia’s Spring Tuneup Ride
(www.brag.org). For three years, these bikers have awakened each morning to the gentle aroma of Café Campesino’s fair trade coffees wafting through the campground. Geoffrey
Hennies, our longtime volunteer brewmaster, and I rose each morning at 5:30 to prepare several hundred cups of coffee and iced mochas. The tuneup ride originated each morning on the campus of Putham Middle School with cyclists slowly fanning out across the rolling hills of Georgia’s piedmont. Across the street from the school was the Uncle Remus Museum — 19th century writer Joel Chandler Harris was born and raised in Eatonton. This quaint town was also the birthplace of Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Alice Walker, best known for her novel
The Color Purple.
In mid-June, the Café Campesino coffee caravan will head to north Georgia for the 2002 BRAG. We’ll look forward to seeing many of our
two-wheelin’ friends again as we brew our way across the Georgia mountains.
Other upcoming events:
Earth Day Celebration – In late April and throughout May, Georgians for Clean Energy and The Sentient Bean Coffee House in
Savannah are co-sponsoring events with an environmental theme. The presentations will feature ecological superheroes, including Coffee Bean Bill, Café Campesino's own Bill Harris! Bill will conduct professional coffee cuppings at The Sentient Bean on
Saturday, April 27th, at 5 PM, followed by a talk on "Coffee Cultivation and Wildlife Habitat: An Economic and Ecological Partnership." For other scheduled events in this intriguing series, check out the Georgians for Clean Energy website at
http://www.cleanenergy.ws.
World Fair Trade Day – They are the stories that seldom make the nightly news, yet are pervasive worldwide. Farmers who produce crops for the global market yet receive just pennies a pound in return, hardly enough to feed their families. Crafters who are paid only a small portion of the profits for their exquisite handiwork, while a series of middlemen takes a much larger cut. But there is an alternative: Fair Trade. By buying Fair Trade products, you help ensure a better environment, healthier working conditions and a living wage for artisans, farmers and workers. And what's the most widely available Fair Trade Certified product in the U.S.? You guessed it – it's coffee!
But while the media harps on the negative aspects of the "coffee crisis," fair traders are offering up a solution. As our loyal Café Campesino customers know, when you buy Fair Trade coffee, you ensure that farmer cooperatives receive
$1.41 per pound for their coffee including a $.15 premium when Organic Certified, more than
four times the rate they get through conventional trade. And because most Fair Trade coffee is Certified Organic and grown
on bird-friendly shaded land, your purchase also encourages environmentally sustainable practices.
On Saturday, May 4th, Fair Trade advocates from nearly 50 countries around the world will celebrate World Fair Trade Day (and the kick-off for Fair Trade Summer) with rallies, meetings, seminars, tastings and other diverse events. You can help spread the Fair Trade message (and enrich the lives of farmers and workers in the developing world) by supporting Fair Trade Day in your local community.
Click here
for some ways you can participate.
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