After Hours

milkshakes, espresso, tea, & love

Coffee House
Issue #1
November 2010
Created by Brandon B. Smith Who are We? Continued Inside
After Hours is a church-run
Fair Trade . . . . . . 2
ministry that runs every Statistics. . . . . . . 3
Thursday night from 9:00p.m.
First Church of God to, well, whenever we want! Volunteers. . . . . . 4
Our focus is to minister
FCOG’s Sundays
to Shippensburg’s college Did you know...
community to draw them
8:30 a.m. Traditional Service away from the alcohol scene Fair trade has been
9:17 a.m. College Bible Study on campus. around since the 1940s
(In The Annex building) We usually host live
11:00 a.m. Contemporary bands, both local and out-of- and supports about
Worship Service town, and our sponsor church, 800,000 farmers. It
the First Church of God,
7:15 p.m. Evening Worship
donates baked goods every allows farmers to
week and funds the coffees, earn three to five
teas, and other products we
serve. times as much as they
Featured Drinks By serving the would make through
community, we hope to draw
conventional markets.
Yumkin people closer to Christ by our
Milkshake ministry’s program. Everyone Although it is
* pumpkin flavor who works at After Hours is selling less than the
* vanilla ice cream a volunteer either from the
* sprinkled cinnamon church, the university, or average price, it is
local vonunteers. If you see trying to set a standard
an apron, talk to us! We’re
Lava Tropics always looking for someone for which all coffee
Smoothie new to meet. must be sold, similar
* peach sorbet Some of the weekly
* pineapple juice volunteers are Phil and Linday to the United State’s
* all-natural coconut flavor Schiavoni, Matt Ramsay, minimum wage.
* blended ice Beverly, and Josh Neil.

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FAIR, FREE and DIRECT Article by Matt Ramsay

C offee is the second most traded com- afterwards, sets a minimum price per
modity in the world second only to pound of coffee, and seeks to encourage
oil, followed by a close third of grains, ethical practices. Fair trade doesn’t only
such as wheat, corn, and rice. Coffee ac- support coffee, but other agricultural
counts for as much as 80% of the GDP products such as cocoa, wine, and sugar.
for countries between the tropics of Cap- Farmers who operate outside of
ricorn and Cancer. Needless to say, it has fair trade prices are at a great risk of
a significant impact on the losing the money they in-
global economy. vest in their crops. Those
Economist Adam “The price of coffee with fair trade buyers
Smith wrote that the is not determined by rid them of that risk by
“Invisible Hand of the growers, but by giving them multiple-
Economics” will take care the New York Stock year contracts. Since the
of business, bringing a Exchange.” prices fluctuate heavily,
balance to the marketplace farmers are never sure if
by self-regulating. It they will receive profit on
appears as though the Invisible Hand the funds they originally invested.
has left many families starving in its For instance, the price of coffee
wake since farmers are incapable of prices from the mid-late 90s dropped
keeping up with the low prices fetched about 50 percent by the turn of the cen-
at the New York Stock Exchange. As a tury and remains unstable to this day.
result, prices for coffee remain lower The way some farmers avoid this insta-
than they need to be to support the people bility is by diversifying their crops by
who grow coffee. The consequences are planting either different kinds of coffee
significant.
Fair trade operates a bargaining
system enabling a certain level of trans- After Hours
parency for farmers: it provides money Coffee House 2
up front for crops rather than a paycheck
or different agricultural products. How-
ever, many of them are not financially
stable enough to begin diversifying their
crops to begin with, thus the farmers
continually lose money.
Although fair trade is beneficial to
poor farmers, it does have some flaws.
Farmers typically only receive a percent-
age of the money paid for the pound of
coffee, and accountability in this area is
lacking. The fair trade minimum price
is also, in my opinion, still far too low to
make any ethical stand.
Perhaps a more effective method of
getting more money to farmers has been
through direct trade or “relationship cof-
fee.” While this method has fewer sub-
scribers, and is largely unregulated, it
relies on coffee purchasers to be in rela-
tionship with farmers and cuts out the
middleman. Whatever money the mid-
dleman would have taken can then be
paid to the farmers. This can result in a
significant increase in farmers’ profits.
However, due to direct trade’s
voluntary nature and lack of regulation,
it has been difficult to trust just
companies who claim to be direct trade.
Some companies such as Smithsonian
Bird Friendly, Kapeh-UTZ, 4Cs Coffee,
and the Rainforest Alliance all claim to
be eco-friendly and direct trade, but they
are not held responsible by a third party,
such as Fairtrade Labeling Organizations
International (FLO), which puts the “Fair
Trade” label on agricultural products.
On the other side of the fence from
fair and direct trading is free trade.
There is no fixed price for how much
free trade farmers get paid; therefore,
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their income can be unstable depend-
ing on their buyer because it changes
every year. Free trade offers no contract
to farmers, which can leave them high
and dry from one year to the next. This
is what fair trade fights against.
It’s Eco-friendly!
Fair trade is doing more than raising
the minimum price of agricultural
goods, but it institutes a healthy
and almost ethical treatment of the
plants themselves. According to The
Guardian, a popular U.K. newspaper,
fair trade has cut down on its farmers’
use of pesticides down by 80 percent in
the past 10 years, while some farmers
have gone chemical-free.
Fair trade also promotes “shade grown”
coffee, which allows the trees to grow in
a more natural environment under the
canopy of trees, which results in more
bird habitats, less need for pesticides,
and less forest disruption.
Coffee Statistics:
Prices and Distribution
Avg $/lb = $2.00
FT $/lb = $1.31
FT Organic = $1.51
FT Imported = +$0.10/lb
USA sells for = $9-12/lb
1 coffee tree = 1 lb/yr
1lb/coffee = 30.5 cups
2 cups coffee/day for 1 yr = 730 cups
730 cups = 18 trees
USA = 2.3 billion lbs/yr
i
...Free, Fair and Direct cont’d from pg 3
The Volunteers
n recent years, a few new labels have
Phil Schiavoni
P
arisen to compete in the coffee market:
Rainforest Alliance, Kapeh-UTZ, Smith- hil has worked
sonian Bird-Friendly, and 4Cs Coffee. Al- as the Campus
though these companies appear to be eco- Minister for FCOG
friendly and
for the past six
Focused on serving the farmers, they are
not held to a higher authority and are not years, and is now
guaranteed to be what they say they are. speaking regularly
Fairtrade Labeling Organizations Inter- at Christian Fel-
national (FLO) is the third-party that cer- lowship. He gradu-
tifies agricultural products as fair trade, ated from ShipU in
and these previously listed companies are 2004 with a degree
not associated with them. in Mathematics Ed with a baseball
In the end, it is up to the consum-
coaching minor. Needless to say, Phil
er to decide how he or she thinks coffee
ought to be grown and how the farmers loves baseball. Phil also enjoys fris-
ought to be treated. There are plenty of bee, pumpkin pie, and board games.
middlemen between the consumer and When ending a phone conver-
the farmer, but the consumer is the voice, sation with his buddies, instead of
the Invisible Hand, that speaks for the “goodbye,” they will say, “Baseball!”
coffee farmers. Phil works with the Coalition for
After Hours Coffee House is current- Christian Outreach (CCO), which is a
ly using premium fair trade and organic
wonderful campus ministry organi-
coffees from around the world. These are
gourmet coffees, which are fresh (usually zation that has won the title of “Best
brewed within a week of roasting) and Christian Workplace” from Christian-
full of flavor. ity Today for four straight years!

After Hours
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pictured: Matt Ramsay, CCO