Blog

This July, exactly 10 years after taking a group of food co-op and natural foods store customers to visit with coffee farmers in the village of Coyona in Peru, our same group will return to to see first-hand the impact of Fair Trade.

I was nervous about my trip to the D.R. Congo. A war has raged there on and off for decades, and heightened violence and political unrest in 2012 has left more than 500,000 people internally displaced. There was a brief lull in the violence during the month of October, so I took the opportunity to go visit our producer partners at SOPACDI and then make the journey across Lake Kivu to visit the Panzi Hospital.

In February I spent a week traveling around Ethiopia with representatives from other coffee companies as part of a Cupping Caravan. In two 15 passenger vans, top loaded with gas ranges, propane, and 5 gallon bottles of water, we spent the first few days cupping—the industry term for analyzing coffee—at various ECX field labs. ECX stands for the Ethiopia Commodity Exchange, which is the government agency responsible for grading all commodities produced in Ethiopia.

I often think about how we are changing the world through trade - with relationships and the belief that everyone has rights, no matter where they are from. It's easy to get overwhelmed by the complex issues spanning the globe, from myriad protests to governmental conflicts to human right abuses. Look at a place like the Democratic Republic of Congo - a war-torn country in Central Africa with a devastated economy and massive sexual violence against women and girls of all ages. Did you know that the D.R. Congo has been called one of the worst places on earth to be a woman?