Starbucks in alliance to maintain coffee supply
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
September 29, 2004
Morgan Lee
MEXICO CITY -- Starbucks Coffee Co., hoping to triple
the number of its shops around the world, is joining
a U.S. development agency and environmental conservationists
to help ensure a sustainable supply of high quality
coffee from Latin America.
Starbucks, which opened its first store in Mexico
in 2002, has expressed concern about the future supply
of top-notch coffee as it moves forward with long-range
plans to open 25,000 stores worldwide.
The coffee giant signed a memorandum of understanding
with the U.S. Agency for International Development,
or USAID, and Washington-based Conservation International
on Monday in Mexico City, to provide economic incentives
for high-quality coffee growers that minimize their
environmental impact.
Starbucks President and CEO Orin Smith said the alliance
is partly his company's effort to pass on the "high
price" of a cup of coffee to farmers.
"That high price enables us to pay the highest
price to the farmers," Smith said.
Under the alliance, Starbucks will pay higher prices
to "preferred providers" -- suppliers that
can demonstrate that money gets to farmers without
being diverted, comply with environmental practices
outlined by Conservation International, and meet humanitarian
standards of the home country or international authorities.
Smith said the company's goal is to buy 60 percent
of its coffee under those standards by 2008.
The humanitarian standards are a component that may
not be related directly to the quality of coffee but
are important to employees, Smith said.
"Our success depends on the 100,000 young people
... who want to work for a company that they can be
proud of," he said.
The agreement reflects the growing power of the premium
coffee market and efforts to exploit it for the benefit
of small farmers.
The premium market is helping farmers whose livelihoods
were devastated by a crisis in overall coffee prices,
which reached an inflation-adjusted 100-year low in
2002.
The agreement signed Monday builds on Conservation
International's work coffee program in Peru, Colombia
and Mexico.
"Farmers' incomes are up. They're already receiving
a premium price for well-grown coffee," said
Glen Prickett, vice president of Conservation International.
In Mexico, similar strategies have already been tested
on a small scale by some local chains -- such as Cafe
La Selva -- selling the crops of small, high-quality
producers and broadening the taste for premium coffees.
Activists on trade and development issues are pushing
the same model worldwide.
In England, the development charity Oxfam announced
in May that it is helping open a chain of "fair
trade" coffee shops serving up a quality brew
that delivers relatively high prices to growers in
the developing world.
Source: http://www.globalexchange.org/campaigns/fairtrade/coffee/2562.html
