Coffee Transforming Lives

Image supplied by Trade Aid

This is Adunya. He is nine years old and he attends his local primary school at Negele Gorbitu in the Yirgacheffe region of Southern Ethiopia. He is able to do so thanks to Fair Trade coffee and New Zealand’s Trade Aid organisation. In 2008 Trade Aid imported around nine shipping containers of coffee from the Oromia Coffee Farmers’ Co-operative Union – the organisation that Adunya’s coffee-farming parents sell their coffee to. The social premiums from those purchases alone will be enough to fund the construction of a new five-classroom school, which will provide more than 600 pupils like Adunya with an education. Without Fair Trade and buyers like Trade Aid, Adunya’s school would not exist. Fair Trade purchases also fund medical centres, drinking water and better roading in rural Ethiopia. www.fairtrade.net www.tradeaid.org.nz

Coffee Lovers Rejoice!

Trade Aid, Christchurch. Feb 2009. Ajr

If the Trade Aid warehouse in Christchurch is anything to go by, we won’t be running out of precious coffee beans any time soon. This is just one wall of roof-high stacks of Fair Trade coffee beans imported from nine origins – Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Columbia, Peru, Ethiopia, Sumatra, East Timor and Papua New Guinea. It was reassuring indeed to stand among them all and to know that a favourite vice will be catered to for some time yet. Trade Aid in fact, imports three-quarters of New Zealand’s Fair Trade coffee beans – more than 686 tonnes annually (that’s 40 container loads) – and they supply more than 60 roasters nationwide. It’s all part of the Trade Aid philosophy of supporting coffee farmers to improve their livelihoods - to give them access to funds that in turn bring about basic improvements to their lifestyles. Every time Trade Aid buys five sacks of coffee in Ethiopia for instance, another child gets a shot at school they would not otherwise have. www.tradeaid.org.nz www.fairtrade.net

Coffee At Source

Photo courtesy of CENFROCAFE

And for those of you who have never seen coffee in its raw state – these Peruvian coffee farmers are members of the CENFROCAFE co-operative – one of the Trade Aid sources of Fair Trade beans. www.tradeaid.org.nz www.fairtrade.net