NOT THEIR CUP OF TEA

Coffee farmers are not paid enough for their produce, according to Fair Trade Cordinator at OXFAM America, Liam J. Brody '00.

"For a pound of coffee that we pay between $5 and $14 for, the commodity exchange says that farmers should get 60 cents a pound. That's what the exporters get paid. But farmers on the open market only get 20 to 40 cents per pound after the middleman," Brody says.

Most of the grande mocha lattes that Harvard students sip are made from the beans of farmers abroad who live in extreme poverty.

"Two-thirds of the folks who grow coffee in the world are poor, small-scale family farmers," Brody says. "They live in the mountains of Nicaragua, Indonesia and Tanzania where electricity, roads and schools exist in a very limited basis. They also don't have first hand knowledge of how coffee is traded in the world and how much people would pay for it in consumer cultures like Europe and United States.

OXFAM helps these farmers form cooperatives so that they can invest in trucks, plants and have bargaining power when they're dealing with trade merchants. The coffee growers can therefore cut the middlemen, known as coyotes in South America, out of the process.