Organic Fair Trade Coffee Has Arrived!

Hooray! Now I can feel especially good about the coffee I serve at Word for Word Books. It was already good, but now it's better! We just received a shipment of Loop d' Loop from the Port Townsend Coffee Company in Port Townsend, Washington. After sampling a number of coffees on our recent scouting trip we settled on our favorite and are looking forward to sharing this rich, dark coffee. It is organically grown and purchased directly from cooperative farmers who are paid a fair price, giving them a living wage.

In the general coffee market growers often receive less money for their product than the cost of producing it. This keeps them trapped in an endless cycle of debt. The middleman makes the profits, while the farmers are forced into poverty, selling future rights to their harvests to pay for their basic and immediate needs. A recent study showed workers in Guatemala earning less than $3 a day for picking 100 pounds of coffee. Farmers in 50 nations make 30 - 50 cents on a pound of coffee for which consumers pay $10 -$15 a pound on the retail market. Since the 1980's activists and organizations have worked to change this situation and there is now a national movement toward supporting fair trade coffee cooperatives throughout the world. More information about the history of the Fair Trade movement is available at http://www.organicconsumers.org/Organic/faircoffee.cfm , from which I have excerpted this material.