TabGroupThe Issue Coffee farming is the world’s largest employer with 25 million farmers, almost all of them in the Third World. Coffee is also the single biggest source of income and foreign exchange for most of the nations of Africa, and a major source in many others. When the coffee industry suffers, as happened a decade ago after foreign aid by the World Bank and other international agencies drove down prices for farmers, entire economies will suffer, and especially those millions of farmers and others in the Third World whose livelihoods depend on this crop. The environment also suffers from the coffee trade, the world’s largest export after oil, because of pressure on farmers to abandon their traditional, niche coffee crops in favor of mass-market commodity crops purveyed by multinationals such as Kraft, Nestle, and Starbucks. International NGOs may also incentivize farmers to abandon their traditional practices by conforming to certain certifications, such as fair trade certification. Through such commodifications of coffee can come loss of genetic diversity, loss of traditional farming practices, loss of community, and loss of sustainability. Probe International works to right the economic and environmental wrongs in the world coffee trade by reforming aid and trade policies that affect coffee, and by helping to create high-value markets for niche beans through our non-profit Green Beanery company. Visit Green Beanery, our online coffee store that specializes in local, niche varieties of coffee beans. Or TabGroup2News and Analysis
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