Each morning I wake up and go to brew myself a cup of coffee. I pull out my bulk sized Maxwell container and pop it into my refillable Keurig cup and place my mug underneath. I have always felt like I was being eco conscious since I didn't use the single use pods or single use to go cups but there was a whole other part of what I was putting into my cup that I was missing the mark on- the actual coffee.
I have always just grabbed for the cheapest coffee on the shelf since I really didn't think there was a difference in the taste. I just figured that the largest container would have less waste, was cheaper for my college budget, and would ultimately last me the entire year. However, me grabbing the cheapest on the shelf really wasn't the most eco friendly. It turns out there is a whole culture that goes on behind coffee that I found when I traveled to Costa Rica with my school to study coffee sustainability.
Down in Costa Rica coffee is a way of living, it's a lifestyle. When we drove into the providence of Poas it was clear that coffee was the crux of their community. On all of the hills you could see the coffee plants with small little houses plopped in the middle of the farms.
While I was in Costa Rica for my ten day trip, I went to four different coffee farms ranging from university to family owned, one government regulated mill, a micro mill, and a cooperative in the time I was there. Each part of the process was not only highly labor intensive but also highly regulated by the government. Seeing it all really opened my eyes to what exactly went into each cup of the coffee I drank.
Coffee runs in the veins of the Ticos, what Costa Rican natives call themselves. They begin drinking coffee at the age of 2 to 6 and only consider it unhealthy once they drink 12 cups or more a day. When they search for jobs as teens they often will begin to work on their family's farm or look towards another farm to begin picking. It doesn't end there and they will even pursue a secondary education focusing on coffee and its different aspects.
My partner from the Universidad Nacional de Costa Rica would pick coffee fruit for eight hours a day five days a week for part of her Master's degree. She does this work in exchange for the ability to perform testing on the crops. I picked coffee berries for just one hour with her and even after that I was sweating and feeling pain in my lower back from hunching over. After that hour my partner and I only picked 3/4 of a cajuela. Cajuelas are square buckets that the farmers measure the pickers' efforts. The photo to the right shows what one cajuela looks like. The farmers then bring their berries to a mill to be turned into the coffee you and I would buy in bags. The mill will measure what the farmer brings in fanegas. One fanega is equivalent to 10 cajuelas. Each fanega will then lead to the production of approximately 100 pounds of milled coffee that ends up in the bags at stores and coffee shops.
The price that buyers get coffee for is determined by the stock market. Believe it or not it's considered a commodity. Based on this predetermined price coffee growers are given a piece of paper quarterly that tells them what price they can sell their coffee at and what rating the coffee should be grown at. It doesn't matter what the climate is like, if there is too much rain, or if there is too little rain. The coffee growers are given the standards that they can grow it making them operate at a profit of "suffering and misery" as a leader of the coffee union told us.
To put some numbers to this a fanega is currently $102 on the stock market. Because Costa Rica is known for their quality they are able to sell theirs at approximately $190. Meaning what my partner and I picked was worth about $25 to the producer. Therefore, one hour of my work was worth $12.50. However, this isn't the pay I would have been getting.
It is approximated by Icafe (The National Institute for Coffee in Costa Rica) that each fanega of coffee costs the growers $100. This is not including the milling process, the roasting process, or exporting. This is simply getting the coffee from seed to the red berry in the container. If all of the profit was given to the producer, which it's not, they would make $90 profit per fanega.
On the other hand places like Dunkin Donuts are making lots of profit on this coffee. If you figure a cup of coffee sells for $2 and each cup of coffee takes 5 grams of coffee to make, the place is going to be able to sell 9,200 cups from a fanega that cost them $190. That leads them to a $18,210 profit margin per fanega they purchase excluding the costs of labor and other costs.
There is a huge inequality to how the wealth is distributed. The union leader that I had talked with told us that their goal was to raise the price per fanega just to $250 in order to operate at a living wage.
It just really showed me all that go into the products that we consume daily. It is so simple to take our products as is and not think about the process it took to get to you. As I have mentioned before in other blogs sustainability is truly about being mindful and thinking about everything that goes into what you are purchasing so that you are able to make the best, most eco friendly choice. Are there any products that you have recently considered the processing of?
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