Meet U.S. Chocolate Partners
Equal Exchange: Interview with Peter Buck
Can you tell us a little about your organization?
We were founded in 1986 by three people who were involved in the organic foods movement, to extend the ideals of the organic movement to take into account the interests of the farmers who grow the food.
In 23 years, we have grown from a few people importing a little coffee from one co-operative in Nicaragua to around 90 worker/owners, importing 6.5 million pounds of coffee, and a range of products, including chocolate, tea, nuts and berries, and, just recently, bananas. We buy from about 40 small-farmer co-operatives in 20 countries.
Why has Equal Exchange chosen to be a fully committed Fair Trade organization?
Our founders decided at the beginning that they wanted to prove that an organization which was 100% Fair Trade and a worker-owned co-operative could be a successful business.
What do you feel your role is in your community and in your producer partners’ communities?
Our principle role is to “move product for the farmers”; to buy and sell as much coffee or tea or chocolate as we can at the Fair Trade price; and to keep coming back to our same trading partners year after year.
If we concentrate on this role, then we help the co-operative, so they can do all the other things that improve the lives of the farmers.
We also help co-operatives improve the quality of their coffee or other crops; and we support their efforts to improve their farming methods, but the leadership in those efforts should be from the co-operative, in collaboration with NGOs like CRS or LWR and frequently with the help of the local diocese.
What type of outreach do you do in the Catholic community in the U.S.? Are there any projects you’ve collaborated with CRS on?
We have one Program Representative assigned full time to our relationship with the Catholic community and CRS with help from others as needed.
We promote the CRS Fair Trade program at Catholic conferences like the National Catholic Education Association, the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, the Religious Education Conference in Los Angeles, and others. We send mailings to our Catholic customers and take out ads in Catholic publications like St Anthony Messenger and National Catholic Reporter and diocesan papers.
We collaborate with organizations like the 8th Day Center in Chicago, the InterReligious Task Force on Central America in Cleveland, Heart Beats, a ministry of the Sisters of the Humility of Mary, and the Partnership for Global Justice, a social justice organization of men and women religious.
We hold workshops and take farmers on speaking tours to Catholic universities and churches.
Catholics have been part of many delegations to visit coffee farmers, including a Pax Christi activist from Buffalo on a recent delegation to Chiapas; a Catholic school senior who won a trip through a Fair Trade essay contest in Cleveland; and Judy McEvitt, who is responsible for one of our top two Interfaith accounts, Spirit of Christ, in Arvada, Colorado.
Why do you think Catholic involvement in the Fair Trade movement is important?
Because there are 30,000 Catholic churches in this country, and nearly 70,000,000 Catholics.
Because Catholic Social Teaching intersects perfectly with principles of Fair Trade, particularly the principles of Subsidiarity and Solidarity; and because CRS and the Holy Father are currently emphasizing Catholic Social Teaching, particularly with the publication of Caritas in Veritate.
Because the Catholic Church, particularly in Latin America but also in Africa and Asia, has been at the forefront of the fight for liberation since the 1960s, and have been deeply involved in the foundation of many of the co-operatives we work with, from CIRSA in Mexico to Manos Campesinas in Guatemala to Peermunde in Kerala state in India.
Because of the tremendous potential stemming from these facts:
- While Catholics are a relatively small part of our customer base (about 900 out of 10,000 accounts), many of them are large and loyal accounts. Many have been buying from us for over 10 years; and five of our top ten Interfaith customers, including the top two, are Catholic, (St Catherine of Siena in Portage, Michigan, and Spirit of Christ in Arvada, Colorado) who each buy more than $20,000 worth of products from us annually. There are five accounts over $10,000 a year in sales and 27 more over $5,000, which are pretty large numbers for churches.
- Many of our original investors were orders of women religious, including the Sisters of St Joseph in Boston and the Adrian and Sinsinawa Dominicans.
What type of outreach do you do in the communities you purchase your products from?
We buy their coffee, we come back every year and if there are problems of quality or supply, we work to solve them rather than moving on to other producers. Our fundamental principle is long-term relationship.
We support our partners’ efforts to improve the quality of their crops. Our Quality Control Manager and our Buyer visit farmer co-operatives frequently and discuss quality and the types of coffee that will sell in the United States. We have also brought QC managers from co-operatives in South America and (next week) East Africa to develop coffee tasting (“cupping”) skills and learn about selling coffee to the U.S.
We work to promote the hard work of our producer partners: the co-operative Las Colinas in El Salvador has made the transition to certified organic coffee, and we are producing a special single-co-operative Café Las Colinas to sell their coffee for a premium price.
We make special efforts to make connections between communities in the United States and co-operatives we purchase from: We took café managers from Ithaca, New York and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to visit a co-operative in Peru, and now provide an exclusive blend of coffee from that co-operative to those cafes.
We take delegations, both of commercial buyers and Interfaith customers, to visit co-operatives. Each delegation stays one or two nights in a farming village, helps to pick coffee and spends an evening hearing about the lives of the farmers. Frequently, they give us the message they want us to take back to our churches and communities. Some of these delegations have resulted in relationships between churches and farming communities.
We return a “Small Farmers Fund” donation to our 11 Interfaith partners for every pound of products purchased (or dollar of sales) by the churches of their denominations. They have used these and other funds on a wide variety of projects, both among our trading partners and in small farming communities in general.
Our Interfaith partners have provided funds to co-operatives for rebuilding after natural disasters, particularly hurricanes in Central America and the Caribbean.
In Colombia, Lutheran World Relief (“LWR”) funded an organic food production project at the Alto-Occidente co-op; and is funding a coffee marketing project at the Gumutindo co-operative in Uganda, both of them at the urging of Equal Exchange.
CRS also funds projects at co-operatives we work with. They are helping a group of women at the APECAFORMM co-operative in Guatemala to roast their coffee for sale in Guatemala. CRS also works with the CECOCAFEN co-operative in Nicaragua and APECAFE in El Salvador, both of which are long-time Equal Exchange trading partners.
Equal Exchange also provides funds directly to co-operatives for mitigating the effects of global warming, by donating a percentage of the sales of our Love Buzz and Co-op Blend coffees. Through our “Small Farmers Green Planet” initiative, we fund projects at the Heiveld and Wupperthal Rooibos Tea co-ops in South Africa; Alto-Occidente in Colombia; Tierra Nueva in Nicaragua (in collaboration with the Presbyterian Church USA); and CESMACH in Chiapas, Mexico.
Besides price, what impact do you feel Fair Trade has had on producer communities?
Solidarity and Subsidiarity. I think that the relationship between Committed Fair Traders and farmer co-operatives, and the contribution we make to strengthening of the farmers’ own institutions is the most important thing we do, more important than price. The inclusion of denominational relief and development organizations in Fair Trade and bringing their development expertise to the co-ops makes a great triangle of solidarity.
Price Stability. The “price impact” comes into play when the world market price declines as it did from 1999 to 2004, and the Fair Trade price is significantly higher (75% or 100%). This enables co-ops and farmers to survive periods of price crisis. When the world market price is high, the difference is minimal.
From all of your experiences with Fair Trade, can you share a memorable experience – either how FT has changed a life, a lesson learned a friendship made . . .
Perhaps the most striking example was an evening on a delegation to the village of Francisco Villa in Chiapas, whose residents are members of CIRSA. After a dinner of tortillas, beans and beef from a cow slaughtered especially for our visit, we participated in a liturgy, with elements I had never experienced, fireworks for example. Then, with the whole village gathered in front of the church, under the stars, we heard the story of their lives as debt peons on the plantations of the large landowners and their 20-year struggle to get their own land and pay it off; to find buyers for their coffee who wouldn’t cheat them; to form their co-operative; and to make the connection with the Fair Trade world. They made it quite clear that we had an obligation to carry their story back to El Norte, and keep finding buyers for their coffee.
CRS believes each of their partners is unique. If you had to define the “uniqueness” of your organization, what would the definition be?
We have stuck with our mission for 23 years and have built the largest Fully Committed Fair Trade coffee company in the country. We have also built one of the two or three largest worker-owned co-operatives. We feel that demonstrating the sustainability of this Fair Trade co-operative combination is our unique contribution.
With $34 million in sales, we have become a medium sized company, far larger than almost any other fully committed Fair Trade coffee company, and that we have a chance over the next 20 years to have a significant impact on the market. Accordingly, our Twenty Year vision is that: There will be . . . A vibrant mutually cooperative community; of two million committed participants; trading fairly one billion dollars a year; in a way that transforms the world.
