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Fill Your Heart and Warm Your Soul with Giving Tree Coffee
Date: December 2, 2004
by Andres A. Calderon
Today in tiny El Salvador alone, more than 12,000 of the country's 15,000 coffee farmers are facing the repossession and forced sale of their land and livelihood. The spiraling social and economic crisis in the global coffee industry is disproportionately affecting children.
World coffee prices are at a 30-year low. Families dependent on the money generated by coffee are unable to make ends meet. They are pulling their children out of school, foregoing basic medicines and cutting back on food. Coffee traders are seeing their businesses collapse. National economies are suffering, as limited resources are stretched, putting pressure on health and education and forcing governments into debt.
The price paid to coffee farmers has fallen by more than 70% over the past five years. Taking inflation into account, families are earning less for their product than their ancestors did 100 years ago.
Transnational companies and "designer coffee" retailers are posting record profits as the price of their main raw material slumps. This means the coffee farmers are paid less for their coffee than it costs to grow it, while the coffee companies make huge profits. The bad news is that corporate gain is consigning some of the world's poorest and most vulnerable people to extreme poverty, the children of El Salvador.
Most of us drink coffee—it is our business to do something about this problem. Ten years from now, we are going to ask ourselves: What have we done to help fight hunger in those developing countries?
Help end the coffee crisis. Please consider buying Giving Tree Coffee. We give preferences to coffee coming from cooperatives. The gourmet coffees such as the ones we use command prices well above the prices set by Fair Trade. We invest all (100%) of our profits back into the coffee farming communities, to release children from their economic, social, and physical poverty, and to enable them to become fulfilled human beings through education.
Giving Tree Coffee warms the soul and fills your heart.
For more information on how we invest profits into the lives of children in El Salvador, visit Children of the Street (COTS) at: