Just Coffee initiative supports grassroots fair trade

Sarah Siegel Staff Writer

Lately, students passing through the College Center have been flocking to a table with a simple grab: “Free Coffee.” Students in the Just Coffee initiative handed out free samples of the stuff last week in return for signatures on a petition seeking to replace Starbucks Coffee with Just Coffee at the Kiosk.

The students behind the campaign got the idea from a spring break trip that they took to the Arizona/Sonora region of the U.S.-Mexico border with Geography 248: The US-Mexico Border: Region, Place, and Process. The class focused on issues of nationality and region, and the trip let them see the issues first-hand. Hannah Ewert-Krocker ’09 reported, “We met with a lot of humanitarian aid workers, leaders of organizations that are fighting for migrants’ rights or organizations that go out into the desert to save people who are dying from dehydration.”

Upon their return, Ewert-Krocker said, “We wanted to do something tangible, something possible in the next six weeks. We couldn’t just start harboring illegal immigrants on campus, so we went to the Just Coffee store.”

Just Coffee is an organic coffee grower cooperative based in Salvador Urbina and Chiapas, Mexico, with facilities in Agua Prieta, Sonora, Mexico and Douglas, Ariz. According to its Web site, the cooperative grows, harvests and markets its coffee in “a spirit of justice.” Its growers and workers receive three times the minimum Fair Trade wage and 10 times that of the average non-domestic Starbucks worker. Judging from the satisfied smiles of the people sampling coffee last week, it tastes great, too.

The Kiosk is the only venue on campus that serves non-fair trade coffee; it orders 60 pounds of coffee per month, which translates into about 6,000 cups. While it is supposed to offer fair-trade coffee as an option, the fair-trade pot is rarely brewing, and customers have to ask for it specifically. That, explained Kiosk worker Kathy DeFayette, is because “people hate the [taste of] Starbucks fair-trade.”

But Ewert-Krocker explained that the campaign to replace Starbucks coffee with Just Coffee is “less of fighting ‘the Man’ than buying locally, and this has a specifically strong place in our hearts because we were there. It’s the idea of buying small-scale so that you support local grassroots initiatives.”

Dylan Cate ’08 said that most coffee growers are small, and subject both to market fluctuation and exploitation from the large corporations who distribute their product. Just Coffee’s mission is to provide sustainable, dignified work that allows people to stay on the land where they grew up, and saves them from having to face the dangerous border-crossings that many undertake.

Cate explained that Just Coffee provides an alternative to exploitative or even mediocre practices. “As a part of the global community, every time we buy something, we are voting for the kind of world we want to see. By providing Just Coffee as an option, we’re providing a better candidate,” said Cate. “It’s not about defeating the corporate oligarchy. It’s about allowing people to vote for a world they believe in. It’s about allowing Vassar students to do this without making huge changes to their own lives.”

The students said that Director of Campus Dining Maureen King has been very supportive. Vassar has no contract with Starbucks, so it would simply be a matter of ordering the Kiosk coffee from a different company. At retail prices, Starbucks coffee costs $13 per pound, whereas Just Coffee costs only $7. While wholesale prices may differ slightly, King did not mention the price of Just Coffee as a concern in making a switch—just that she needs to know whether Just Coffee is something that students want on campus.

Just Coffee has already collected 350 signatures for their petition, but its advocates want 1,000 before presenting the petition to King at the end of term. They will be in the College Center with the petition and coffee samples on Monday, April 30; Wednesday, May 2; and Thursday, May 3.