I guess you could call me a birkenstocked Burkean: I'm an evangelical Christian, I bike to work, I have a new interest in fair trade products, I support organic food co-ops and I believe in "organic" political reform over time. I'm conservative but I want to solve poverty. I'm spiritual, but I believe love and justice come through physical acts. I think global warming is an issue, but my first priority is to love my friends and family.
Welcome to the 21st century. Rumors have it evangelicals not only want to save souls but are hot on the trail of poverty reduction. Globalization has brought to us the concerns of those in countries once deemed "backward" and underdeveloped. They are asking us to "do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God" (Micah 6:8). Now they are telling us what we did not want to believe: the way we live has helped them stay poor longer.
For example, every Sunday churches across Canada drink thousands of litres of cheap coffee—the kind that tastes like a paper bag brewed through a gym sock. It fosters community, but it also fosters status quo poverty overseas.
Abstracted from real people and real costs, the habit of consumption drives us to inconsistency: we think money saved on cheap coffee could be sent overseas in the form of aid to poor farmers.
But under World Trade Organization rules (WTO), those small-time farmers are forced to pay tariffs up to three times that of our own, are unable to subsidize their crops and enlist the help of their families all in an effort to compete with transnational corporations. That has allowed Canadians to use only 10 per cent of their income on food, while poor farmers use 40 per cent or more.
Overwhelmed development
One of the reasons consumption does not worry us so much, is that we equate consumption with economic growth, and economic growth with development.
"Development policies have largely failed in the last 20 years," says Gavin Fridell, author of Fair Trade Coffee: The Prospects and Pitfalls of Market-Driven Social Justice (2006). He notes that Africa is the only continent whose average personal income actually dropped 11 per cent in the last 20 years. "If you want to get to the core, it's really about how the market completely overwhelmed development."
Take it from the World Trade Organization. After years of trade agreements that have failed to lift the poorest third of the world out of poverty, even their offices in New York have switched to fair trade coffee, quaffing cups of goodwill toward farmers.
Introduced by the Mennonite Central Committee in the 1950s, fair trade is now a multi-billion dollar industry world wide. The Fair Trade Labeling Organization (FLO) based in Bonn, Germany, ensures that farmers in democratically run co-operatives are paid a decent wage, no child labour is used and coffee is grown in an environmentally sustainable way.
Since Starbucks was cornered by anti-globalization activists in 2002, their own fair trade blends now comprise five per cent of their overall sales. Starbucks represents 10 per cent of all specialty coffee in the world.
"That's a lot of fair trade coffee, which is good," says Fridell, "but we shouldn't be duped into thinking the market will continue to expand. Large corporations are making profits by tapping into ethical desires. There are about 670,000 farmers helped through fair trade—which has built hospitals and schools—but it obscures the fact that the rest of the 25 million, or 97 per cent of farmers world wide, are still not being paid a decent wage for their labour."
The WTO is still wondering what to say about a coffee price dive in 2001 that made poor farmers pull their kids out of school while the four largest coffee roasters—Kraft, Proctor and Gamble, Sara Lee and Nestle—took advantage of the low price and banked billions.
Next to oil, coffee is the second most traded commodity in the world. After the dissolution of the International Coffee Association trade regulator in 1989 and the rise of neo-liberal trade policies, the already volatile coffee market became so overflooded that in 2001 prices dropped from one dollar a pound to 41 cents. The last time coffee was that cheap was in 1882. According to the Oxfam report Mugged: Poverty In Your Cup Of Coffee, Vietnamese farmers were struggling to cover just 60 per cent of their production costs and their diet was described as "pre-starvation."
Asking the question
The juxtaposition between profit and loss is jarring and simplistic. But the question remains: Given the heightened concern of evangelicals for poverty worldwide, why have churches opted to pay the lowest price for coffee in order to send the change overseas in the form of aid?
"We just go to Wal-Mart and get what we need," was a typical response in a recent coffee survey among Winnipeg churches. One even had a contract with Starbucks.
In the coffee documentary Black Gold, produced by Nick and Marc Francis, a co-operative farm representative in Ethiopia asks his farmers how much they get for a kilo of coffee beans. In 2003, one kilo sold for 23 cents, they say. Then he tells them how much it's worth in North America. The same kilo made 80 cups of Starbucks coffee at $2.90 each, he says—roughly 1,000 times the original price. Meanwhile, the documentary shows farmers in the co-operative who are too poor to send their children to school and are forced to cut down their coffee trees to produce chat, a local narcotic.
At the same time USAID sent millions of bags of their own subsidized wheat to Ehiopia during a famine, while the country's 77 million coffee producers remained unsubsidized due to WTO regulations.
Convenient as it might be, separating consumption choices from justice goals just doesn't make sense, says Dan Wiens, director of the Canadian Foodgrains Bank and former board member of Micah Challenge.
"There are two ways to help farmers in the south—one is to help them with projects, and the other is to stop exploiting them in the first place.
"Evangelicals give out of their largess to fulfill the biblical mandate of giving to the poor—they do that quite well. But they don't think about how their lifestyles affect global hunger in general. Their choices, especially around food, tend to contradict their charity," says Wiens. In terms of social justice, he calls evangelicals "one of the last unreached peoples."
Currently, the Micah Challenge (www.micahchallenge.org) and the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada (EFC) are lobbying the government for better trade policies in the WTO and in the NAFTA and FTAA agreements. They support the United Nations Millenium Development goal of halving poverty by 2015.
International policy analyst for the EFC and spokesperson for Micah Challenge Jocelyn Durston agrees that "there needs to be an awareness of how we as consumers affect people overseas." But she admits the EFC and Micah Challenge have only one policy paper on trade issues and no specific programs to educate consumers on ethical choices.
What do do?
So what can churches use as a starting point in asking the question "what would Jesus drink?" They might begin by spending more money on fair trade coffee.
During the coffee crisis of 2001, when small producers were faced with starvation or diversifying into narcotics, co-operative farms who had agreed to sell Fair Trade coffee were still making $1.26 per pound instead of the 41 cent price paid through the New York Board of Trade.
Or visit your local Ten Thousand Villages store (run by MCC) and buy Level Ground Coffee. They purchase directly from small farmers overseas and roast their beans in Victoria, B.C. By cutting out middlemen between the producer and the consumer, they are able to return 30 per cent of the retail value back to farmers.
Getting into fair trade coffee requires a communal mindset. By switching to fair trade coffee, churches will help people become more aware of how consumer choices affect others.
Perhaps evangelicals will only begin to tackle poverty once they view consumption as a spiritual discipline.
