Information about Café Campesino and fair trade coffee.

What is fair trade coffee?

Fair trade coffee is purchased directly from coffee growers / cooperatives at a price three to five times

higher than they can get by selling their coffee on the conventional market.  Traditionally coffee is

purchased by wholesalers who sell it to exporters who sell it to the roasters.  By bypassing a string

of middlemen, the fair trade coffee movement seeks to pay a fairer price to growers in order to

improve the quality of life for the farmers and their families.

 

What is Café Campesino?

 

Café Campesino is a coffee roaster dedicated to creating and expanding a fair trade market for

small-scale coffee producers.

 

What kind of coffee are we offering?

 

The coffee we are selling is produced from quality beans, on par with coffee sold in gourmet coffee shops. 

Most of it is organically grown under shade.  While higher yielding hybrids have been developed for cultivating

under full sun in deforested fields, traditional coffee is a shade plant.  Trees and other plants which provide shade,

such as bananas or plantains, help maintain a more diverse ecosystem, preserve the topsoil, provide wood for the

family kitchen and can be a secondary source of income.

 

Why are we, the East Chestnut Street Mennonite Church youth group, marketing this coffee?

 

Our youth group first traveled to southern Georgia in the summer of 2002 to do service projects. Part of our

experience included visiting various projects around Americus, Georgia, including the offices of Café Campesino. 

The Café Campesino staff talked to us about global markets and how fair trade is different from normal importing

businesses.  Since we are always looking for ways to raise money to fund the activities that we do, such as attend

the Mennonite Youth Assembly every other year, a number of us became interested in doing a fund raising

activity that would also help  make markets more just and give better prices to coffee farmers for their products.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tips for making a good cup of coffee: