For a Healthy Planet and some Great Coffee
Know what You're Buying
(ARA) – We take for granted that we can head to the grocery store and pick up just about whatever we need for dinner. While running in to shop on the way home from work, most people never give a thought to the food they choose. Where did that tropical fruit come from? Were these vegetables grown in ways that protect the soil? How many trees were cut down so this beef could graze? How much did the Third World farmer get from that pricey bag of gourmet coffee?
“There is often a disconnect between consumers and the effects their habits have on the environment,” says Kathryn Wolford of Lutheran World Relief (LWR), a group that works with partners in 50 countries to help people grow food, improve health, strengthen communities and build livelihoods.
“Few U.S. consumers are able to see that satisfying the appetites of an affluent society impacts faraway forests, farmlands and fishing grounds. But the fact is that the health and well being of people is intimately tied to the health of the land. Someone somewhere pays the price when our actions put too much strain on the environment,” she adds.
A direct link between quality of life and the environment is clear, however, to quite a few people in developing countries. Many of the very poorest people in the world live straight from the land and its resources. They have to depend on it, and on thier own hard work and ingenuity. But a new tropical resort may have taken away land they used to farm. Cheap shrimp on our plates may come from shrimp farms built where they used to fish. Depending so much on nature makes the rural poor vulnerable to environmental changes.
“They do not have the safety nets of bank accounts, cupboards of canned food, credit cards or health insurance to get them through difficult times,” says Wolford. “When disasters strike, a degraded environment can be deadly. People living on the only land they can find – such as flood plains and bare hillsides – are much more vulnerable to the ravages of flood, drought, and earthquake than those in better locations.”
Vulnerability like that turned Hurricane Mitch in Central America, already the storm of the century when it struck, into an even bigger disaster. Winds reached 180 miles per hour in that 1998 super hurricane, but even worse was the immense amount of rainfall that accompanied the storm -- up to two feet per day. Torrents of water and mud wiped away entire hillsides and communities, claiming an estimated 11,000 lives. The exact number will never be known because some of those who died had never been counted when they were alive. Among the survivors, in El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua, many lost both their homes and their harvests.
“This big a storm was going to cause damage, but the question is ‘How much?’ It hit hardest at poor communities on marginal riverlands, partly because of hills and valleys stripped bare for lumber, firewood and pastureland. The bare land could not contain the run-off,” says Wolford, who visited the area after the disaster. “Despite the familiar saying, this was more an ‘act of man’ than it was an ‘act of God.’” Deforestation and erosion made storm damage much worse.
Reyna Maria Gutierrez, a coffee farmer in Nicaragua, saw the effects of Hurricane Mitch firsthand. She is part of a 70-person fair trade coffee cooperative and one of the 20 million people in the world whose livelihood comes from growing coffee. The storm destroyed her home and also wiped out 25 acres of newly planted coffee seedlings. Hurricane Mitch not only devastated her community, it also wiped out their one source of income.
With help from Lutheran World Relief’s Coffee Project, which brings fair trade coffee to thousands of U.S. parishes, Reyna’s cooperative received 100,000 new coffee seedlings and used them to renovate 60 acres of land. LWR also helped her village rebuild homes damaged by Hurricane Mitch.
The LWR Coffee Project guarantees farmers like Reyna a fair price for their crop. That’s a far cry from the conventional coffee trade that pays small farmers as little as one percent of what we pay for a cup of coffee.
Fair trade also provides farmers with affordable credit and technical training, and introduces them to new, environment-friendly farming techniques. Because most fair trade coffee is organic, it not only provides farmers with a decent living but also the way it is grown helps save forests, stop erosion and protect biodiversity. When Hurricane Mitch hit, a lot of the coffee in Reyna’s village was safe -- because it was growing the natural way, under the canopy of a healthy forest that could stand up to the winds and rain.
Does it make a difference to anyone, or to the planet, if you know what you are buying? Absolutely. Ask Reyna.
For more information on ordering fair trade coffee, or how people around the world make good use of the environment, visit www.lwr.org/fairtrade, or call (800) LWR-LWR2 (597-5972).
Courtesy of ARA Content
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