Buy Breaking The Silence Fair Trade Coffee

The Delicious Taste of Justice!

BTS partners with the Comite Campesino del Altiplano (Highlands Committee of Small Farmers) and the Just Us! Fair Trade Coffee Roasters in Grand Pre, Nova Scotia to import fairly traded organic coffee beans. This coffee is sold with a specially created Breaking the Silence label and supports cooperatives and communities located near San Lucas Toliman, in the department of Solola, and coordinated through the CCDA (Farmers Committee of the Highlands, a Mayan Kaqchikel grassroots organisation that struggles for redistribution of land and economic justice).

In 2002, the Breaking the Silence Network (BTS) and Just Us! Fair Trade Coffee Roasters Cooperative near Wolfville began a joint venture to support small farmers who are members of the CCDA (the Small Farmers’ Committee of the Highlands). These farmers wanted to become organically certified, to end forever dependence on intermediaries and pitiful prices. When we first met these farmers, it seemed as if their hope was only a dream, since the meagre amount they received for their coffee could never allow them to pay the costs involved in the organic certification process.

In 2001 BTS and Just Us! sent a CIDA-funded Tatamagouche Centre Intern, Caren Weisbart, to carry out a feasibility study with the CCDA. This resulted in Breaking the Silence and Just Us! deciding to support these farmers by paying a fair trade price for 6,000 pounds of coffee beans. In addition, BTS agreed to market this coffee through its members and supporters, as well as churches and community groups throughout the Maritimes. We were scared, as this seemed a huge task for a volunteer network, perhaps beyond us. Yet we felt a commitment to the CCDA, whose members many of us had come to know personally on Tatamagouche Centre-sponsored Breaking the Silence delegations.

We are delighted to say that we sold all of that shipment and doubled the next order to 12,000 pounds. Since that time, 35 families have received organic certification, and another 100 farmers hope to do the same!

We ask you to consider ordering Breaking the Silence coffee from Just Us!

Ten Reasons to Purchase Breaking the Silence Coffee from Just Us!

(1-888-NOT-THEM)

1) You support a meaningful, ongoing relationship between Maritimers and Guatemalan farmers.

2) You support over 100 families who are small producers of coffee in Guatemala to become organically certified, thus ensuring a long-term fair price for their coffee, instead of being paid a pittance for their production.



3) You make it possible for more children (especially girls) to go to school or continue their schooling past primary school, instead of having to work to contribute to their family's income.

4) You support the creation of hope in communities. Families often feel despair when confronted daily by the injustice of the global economic system, which is based on a system of cheap labour. Desperation forces adults and children to accept pay for their production or labour which is well below the cost of living. This translates into malnutrition, lack of health care, lack of schooling, migration to the city, especially for teen-age girls who are forced to leave their families to work as domestics or textile sweat-shop workers in or near Guatemala City.

5) You support a healthy environment as well as your health and the health of the coffee producers by purchasing organic coffee, grown under shade trees without the use of chemicals. When coffee farmers know that they will receive a better price if they switch to environmentally sound coffee production, they are motivated to improve their environmental practices. If they do not receive a fair trade price for organic coffee production, they may as well continue to use chemicals, which in the short run produce large harvests of coffee more rapidly and sell to intermediaries (known as coyotes).

6) As well as supporting coffee farmers and their families, you also support the Comite Campesino del Altiplano (the CCDA, or the Highland Farmers' Committee) in organizing and seeking justice for all Mayan peasants, both those small producers of coffee and those who are landless and must work on large coffee and sugar-cane plantations, with dreadful working conditions and illegal poverty wages.

7) You support the Just Us! Coffee Roasters Cooperative in its commitment to enable the development of new fair trade cooperatives. Just Us! wants to move beyond support for already established coffee cooperatives and help new groups enter the fair trade market. That is why they proposed and support the Breaking the Silence Coffee Project.

8) By purchasing Breaking the Silence coffee in bulk for your church or community group, you can obtain the wholesale price, and sell the coffee for the retail price, thus raising a sizeable amount of money for your organization’s projects. In B.C., parent-teacher groups have raised large amounts of money for their schools by selling fair trade coffee to parents, while at the same time ending the need to send children out to sell chocolate bars and raffle tickets!

9) Purchasing Breaking the Silence coffee is an opportunity to educate your members as to why frugality, which can be a very good value, is not always the most ethical policy. We do not believe that Maritimers would really be content to buy cheap coffee, if they had seen the working conditions of coffee pickers.

10) And finally, this high-quality coffee tastes great! The taste alone is worth the price. In addition to the great coffee, you will be contributing to the delicious taste of justice.

Top of Page


 

 

.

Related Links

 

About Us | Partnerships | Delegations | Internships | Accompaniment | News and Updates | Home | Contact Us

Graphics Design by Susan Corning. Programming by Blake McDonald.