UK Supporter Traverses UK for Coffee Kids
Coffee Kids supporter Neil LeBihan, of Exchange Coffee in Lewisham and a champion barista, is riding across the UK from Land’s End to John O’Groats in a fundraiser for Coffee Kids. Please read his blog entry below and throw your support behind his efforts at his profile page on Just Giving. Please note that only UK taxpayers can donate through Just Giving.
Hi, this is Neil.
I hope that if you have either linked into this article from our Twitter page, Facebook etc or have simply come across this blog that you take a couple of minutes to read through this piece. I do feel that the coffee community and coffee consumers out there (of which of course there are millions of you) do now have a role to play in raising awareness about coffee at source, and the issues that are faced by vast numbers of people at the start of the coffee chain. I came into coffee only in the last few years, and as a direct experience of my seeing coffee at source whilst in India. For those who saw my presentation at the UKBC you will have been given a little insight into my journey into coffee.
Coffee is one of the the most traded agricultural commodities in the world. According to the World Bank coffee farmers earn less today than their ancestors did 100 years ago. Over 125 million people worldwide are dependent on coffee as their sole source of income. Vast numbers of families continue to live in abject poverty. Many families face chronic malnutrition and poor sanitation. They don’t have spare cash or access to things we take for granted like clean water, basic health care and free education. The price of coffee is determined by speculators in New York and London who buy and sell coffee based on the weather in Brazil, rain in Ethiopia and other factors. An efficient coffee farmer could pick an estimated 100 pounds per day (approximately 45 kilos) and receive 4 dollars for his labors?!?!? Fair trade has proved to be a good way to bring consumers into the solution, but the majority of farmers are still not receiving even those minimum prices. The price you pay for a coffee is roughly the amount a coffee farming family in Central and South America make in a day. You are all probably aware that there are many more facts available, and I perhaps apologize for stating these facts and figures so abruptly, but sometimes the message needs to be got across. It does though paint a very contrasting picture from the marketing power of the likes of Costa who can afford to spend £1 million pounds of their marketing budgets trying to persuade coffee drinkers that their ‘brand’ is best and a Flat White is what you really want to drink. I know most of us hopefully don’t support such organizations through our consumer power, but am I the only one that thinks that somewhere along the line something has gone terribly wrong with Western culture where we find Peter Andre fronting a coffee company in a campaign to publicize Flat Whites. With the true facts of coffee available I found it somewhat insulting.
I hope through finding out as much as I can about the coffee industry and specifically those affected at the start of the chain that I can relay as much information as I can to coffee drinkers and interested parties out there, so that we are all better equipped with more information in order to make more informed choices about where we drink our coffee.
I will be cycling from Lands End to John O’Groats at the end of May to raise money for Coffee Kids. I came across Coffee Kids via the recent UK Barista competitions and have been in regular correspondence with them of late in the hope of my helping publicize the good work they carry out. Coffee Kids does make a difference to many lives. Coffee is such an enormously traded product that I wondered how it would be possible to help those people at the start of the coffee chain by fundraising alone to start with. I have reservations as I am sure we all do with money raised for many charities being eaten up in their inherent bureaucracies, but Coffee Kids does appear to be very different. They are having a direct impact on trying to help coffee farming families create alternatives to being solely reliant on coffee, so that entire communities survival doesn’t depend on one volatile crop a year.
So this first blog on the subject is an attempt on my part to try and get some facts out there about coffee, to get as many people aware of the reality behind the global coffee economy, and begin raising awareness generally. I shall be working closely with Coffee Kids in the future and hope to document further the work they carry out.
I have a profile page on Just Giving ( Please note that only UK taxpayers can donate through Just Giving. )set up to raise money on the back of my bike ride and do hope that if you can, you can contribute and assist the good work that they carry out. We all have a role in making more informed choices about the goods we consume and we can only make these choices with good and true information.
Thank you for taking the time to read this.