Harvard students should think of coffee more deeply—not just as a source of caffeine, said speakers at the Harvard Fair Trade Coffee Festival yesterday.

The event, held in Ticknor Lounge and attended by several dozen students, featured speakers from coffee makers Green Mountain Coffee and Equal Exchange Coffee, as well as from the humanitarian organization Oxfam.

The speakers and student organizers highlighted what they called the current crisis in the global coffee market, in which overproduction has driven prices down 70 percent from their high five years ago.

Jon Jacoby ’99, the Oxfam representative, offered a variety of grim statistics on the matter.

He said that 600,000 Central American workers have been laid off recently and that many farmers are only being apid 24 cents per pound—a sum that in many cases does not cover their costs of production.

“It’s a supply and demand problem,” he said. “We all learned about this in Ec 10.”

The focus of the afternoon session was to promote ‘Fair Trade’ agreements—which pay farmers the above market rate of $1.26 per pound—as a solution to the plight of the farmers.

Speakers explained that Fair Trade programs are able to pay the higher rate amount by reducing the role played by intermediates, who often buy coffee from farmers at 18 percent of the price they eventually charge consumers.

Lindsey Miller, of Equal Exchange Coffee, spoke on the wider importance of the campaign for Fair Trade coffee.

“It’s important that you understand what’s behind your cup of coffee,” she told the group.

She noted that coffee is the world’s second-most traded commodity by value, next to petroleum.

She also said that recent progress has shown that Fair Trade agreements for coffee can lead to similar programs for other crops, like bananas, cocoa and tea.

The speakers also emphasized the wide range of global issues that can be helped by the Fair Trade movement.

Fair Trade farmers are offered financial incentives for using organic methods to grow their crops.

Some of these include “shade” growing, which prevents the clear-cutting of forests.