2008 Woodie Awards
Fair trade brews conversation on campus
Garrett Quinn
Issue date: 10/27/04 Section: News
On Monday Oct. 25, more than a dozen students attended a Suffolk Students for Peace & Justice sponsored discussion about Fair Trade Coffee in the Donahue Building.
The discussion was the unofficial start of a campaign by students to bring Fair Trade Coffee to Suffolk cafeterias. The discussion was earmarked with a slideshow presentation by Miguel Paz, a representative of the Peruvian coffee cooperative Cecovasa. Paz's presentation showed a life of hard and strenuous work along with strong family ties and a tightly knit community.
Paz, through the help of translator and business partner Jean Walsh of Trade Fair, said that farmers in Peru face great difficulty in surviving, let alone making a living. Paz said. The strength of big businesses makes it very hard for farmers to survive."
This is where Cecovasa comes in. Cecovasa is a cooperative that helps small farmers sell their products to consumers using fair trade practices. With coffee prices at an all time low, Cecovasa pays the actual production cost of the coffee instead of the market cost. Traditional companies engage in what Walsh called "unfair practices" and exploitation. "They don't reinvest in the community and this creates problems as well," Walsh said.
In 1970, Cecovasa was formed with the help of the Catholic Church and the International Aid Foundation to help indigent farmers improve their lives. The organization has been helping farmers by selling their products at the fair trade price to the distributors and returning profits to the community, along with the farmers themselves.
The co-op is helping to certify farms as organic. Cecovasa has helped certify over 6,750 acres and is currently engaged in certifying another 1,000. Universities across the country, along with various corporations, are starting to engage in the practice of serving or at least providing the product at their cafeterias. MIT, Harvard and Emerson are just some of the local institutions that have adopted Fair Trade Coffee.