The Grower’s Return
Monday, June 23rd, 2008
As much as there is a massive power imbalance in the world, it is the tropical zones that are bolstering the round the clock function of the developed world. Our much beloved drug, caffeine, diligently serves society as an alertness crutch from students on late night literary rampages to pilots berthing a 370 ton highly explosive aluminum tube with wings. Without caffeine most of the developed world and fast ‘developing’ nations would swagger in pace. Caffeine the principle psychoactive compound in coffee (also guarana and tea), needless to say you are well acquainted with; is responsible for temporarily staving off drowsiness and increasing alertness.
Coffee the world’s beverage of choice for administering it, is almost exclusively grown in tropical and sub-tropical zones mostly in countries still developing. Coffee is second only to oil in the world’s most traded commodity, but most coffee growers receive about 1 cent per cup (when sold though multinational coffee brands). For a farm product that is very labour intensive to grow and harvest, coffee farmers are kept under poverty line by financially punitive conditions offered from their crop. Many less scrupulous multi-national companies pay in advance for growers’ crop, under the guise of what appears a modest sum. Growers are only to be trapped into a cycle debt year in year out, heaven forbid their crop doesn’t fail- such is the nature of agriculture.
Fair tradecoffee instigated by Oxfam serves to repay a ‘fair’ sum for coffee grown by producers. Hence when it came time for the annual Fair trade fortnight (and fair trade art exhibition) I was compelled to make make coffee cups bearing the 1 cent piece embedded in it, as a visual reminder to coffee drinkers just how much is handed back. Most of them sold, save 4, which still reside at the Oxfam shop on Hay St, Perth. They are on sale now and are half the price they were during the exhibition (half proceeds of the sale go to Fair Trade Collective), and the other half, covers the cost of production.
