Hessian bags line the ground, overflowing with red berries. Farmers chat amongst themselves, carefully pulling each berry off, as if their lives depend on it. With grins on their faces, they haul 60-kilogram bags up the steep green hills that surround them and their villages.
Isolated from the realms of modern society, the only way to access these tiny villages is via muddy slopes that resemble a riverbed rather than a road. Trucks and Ute’s with no windows have seen better days as they carry the bags down to the city centre.
This is a day in the life of Papua New Guinean coffee farmers. Every day they struggle to survive, with the coffee they carefully farm their only source of income.
Coffee farmers all over the world struggle to survive, being paid a bare minimum price for the beans that are their livelihood. In Papua New Guinea it is no different.
Schools with no desks, health centres with no beds and families with no money. This is the life that they have come to know. But all that is about to change.
Introducing Fair Trade, an initiative that will allow coffee famers and other agricultural farmers to be treated as equals in the global trading market.
This initiative has only recently been introduced to Australia, but has already had enormous success in Europe, with the same endeavour planned for the rest of the world.
Coffee Connections is one business playing an enormous role in the highland coffee farms of Papua New Guinea.
Their warehouse in Goroka, PNG is filled to the roof with hundreds of bags of coffee beans, ready to send off to café’s and restaurants, many based in Melbourne.
“Coffee Connections saw the opportunity for growth in the international market and sponsored its collection of contracted organic farmers to form a co-operative movement so as to benefit from the premiums,” says Coffee Connections’ Marketing Manager, Craig McConaghy.
As the beans are washed and sorted by hand, they are almost ready to enter they highly competitive coffee market where one kilo will usually sell for less than we consumers pay for a single cup.
“Small coffee farmers in PNG lack the cohesion, the funds and the acumen to put it all together without the help of a benevolent sponsor,” says McConaghy,” PNG does not have a marketing problem, just a production problem. The Government has forgotten about them.”
Around 85% of coffee grown in PNG is grown on small farms of less than two acres, a tiny granule in the global coffee market. There are four major coffee roasters in the world (Kraft, Nestle, Procter & Gamble and Sara Lee), that combined, buy almost half the world’s coffee beans each year, often paying farmers the lowest possible price.
But organisations such as Oxfam are on a mission to change this through campaigns such as Make Trade Fair that raise awareness in the general public.
Oxfam Australia’s Trade Campaign Manager, Jeff Atkinson says that Fair Trade is definitely a step in the right directions, but will by no means alleviate poverty.
“We try to raise awareness of the fact that many of the producers of the products we buy live in poor circumstances and get a very low price for their products,” says Atkinson, “Our role is to promote the idea and to hopefully increase demand for Fair Trade certified products.”
Women and their children sit in a large warehouse, coffee beans strewn across the floor, as they sort through millions of beans, only keeping the perfect.
As the coffee beans are loaded into ships containers bound for café’s and restaurants all over the world, Gavan Hogan from Five Senses Coffee in Melbourne is awaiting his next shipment.
In a room no bigger than a garage, bags and containers of coffee beans line the walls. The aroma of roasting coffee floats out into the street and the sound of the coffee grinder whirring can be heard from outside.
The coffee lining the walls comes from all over the world, from Dominica to Kenya and Costa Rica to PNG. Five Senses deals directly with PNG coffee farmers, giving them an above average price for their beans.
According to Hogan, “The initial motivation was to send back money to PNG and coffee was the medium through which we did that.” Having lived in Goroka, the coffee centre of PNG, Hogan was aware of the dire situation the coffee farmers were in and acted upon what he saw.
In the beginning, they imported only a few bags of coffee at a time. Five Senses now imports container loads of beans and sells them on to café’s and restaurants across Melbourne.
“When we buy the coffee we pay for it upfront and part of the money we pay for fair trade coffee goes towards infrastructure and development in the village or in the area where the coffee comes from,” he says.
Fair Trade has created a unique trading system that does not just consider economic benefits but also focuses on the benefits to farmers in third world countries.
The extra money the farmers are receiving, although only a small amount, has led to vast improvements in healthcare and education, and has also contributed to economic independence.
For McConaghy, who lives amongst these farmers, he can see the positive impact Fair Trade is having on the economy.
“The money that villages earn from coffee growing, goes towards special items such as school fees and extra family items.”
According to Dr Anna Hutchens from the Australian National University, Fair Trade “demonstrates that an alternative model of trade, in which small producers are respected and empowered rather then exploited, is possible.”
Dr Hutchens goes on to explain “that international trade can benefit those at the very bottom of the economic ladder if certain principles and practices are prioritised.”
In Melbourne alone, thousands of cups of coffee are consumed of every second of every day. If you look down any bustling city or suburban street, it is clear the coffee industry is thriving, with café’s and coffee bars lining the streets.
Statistics from Oxfam reveal that eight per cent more coffee is currently being produced than consumed. Although the current growth rate for demand is around one per cent per year, supply is increasing at a rate of two per cent, which is no match for the small family farms in PNG.
Unlike major coffee producers such as Brazil, where mechanised coffee farms stretch as far as the eye can see, each farm in PNG is normally one or two acres.
Plastic sheets are spread across the ground all through the villages, covered in tiny white beans waiting their turn to become the next espresso.
“Despite its rapid growth, the Fair Trade market is still a very small percentage of all world trade,” says Dr Hutchens.
A significant reason for the small percentage of Fair Trade products is the high barriers to entry set by the Fairtrade Labelling Organisation. It can take up to two years for a company to be certified as Fair Trade and there are forests of paperwork to complete.
“There are high barriers to entry, such as costs and compliance issues into the fair trade market,” says McConaghy.
The number of Fair Trade products available is dramatically increasing each year, but the majority of regular coffee drinkers are not aware of the millions of lives they affect with every cup of coffee they consume.
“As consumers learn about Fair Trade and become more discerning about the goods they buy, companies are pressured to meet the demands for Fair Trade products,” says Dr Hutchens, when asked about consumers’ knowledge of the initiative.
International coffee companies such as Starbucks strongly emphasise their ‘socially responsible’ coffee but are still as yet to jump on the Fair Trade bandwagon.
One regular coffee consumer, Amanda Cooper was taken aback when informed about the Fair Trade campaign.
“I’ve never really thought about where my coffee comes from,” she says, speaking for millions of other coffee drinkers around Australia.
“If I was made more aware of Fair Trade, I would definitely buy it because the small farmers need to be supported, like in any industry.”
For Hogan, the Fair Trade movement “allows people who drink coffee to feel good about the purchase they make. People who are socially aware would buy fair trade coffee over other sorts of coffee.”
According to McConaghy, “When you get that marketing package together, then people in those consuming nations sleep better at night in the knowledge that they are perhaps making a contribution to those who are not as well off.”
McConaghy also believes that Fair Trade will not work to its full potential unless the PNG Government are prepared to become involved.
“Fair Trade may bring more cohesion to the society and make their lives more comfortable, however, it will not reduce poverty unless Government initiatives are more aligned with those of the needs and aspirations of the rural dwellers.”
Although the idea of Fair Trade is assisting to create an ethical trading system, there is still a lot that needs to be done.
“It will give better opportunities for societies to organise themselves and take some control of their destiny,” says McConaghy,” but all the farmers in PNG are bush economists”.
The farmers will always want a higher price for their coffee, no matter what the international market price is doing.
Five Senses Coffee will continue to support Fair Trade, Hogan describing it as “an attempt at making sure that the farmers in PNG and other countries get paid a fair price. It doesn’t always work as well as we would hope, but it is an attempt.”
Although one of the aims of Fair Trade is to eventually assist in fighting global poverty, it will be a few years until we see anything to that affect.
“It will not alleviate poverty but it may ensure that workers are not exploited for their labour,” says McConaghy.
As the Fair Trade coffee from PNG is unloaded from the containers and arrives as cappuccinos in the hands of coffee connoisseurs’ across Melbourne, the taste will be no different and it is still just as addictive. But it is different.
So the next time you order a skinny decaf latte, stop and think about how one cup could change someone’s life.
