Coffee brands love to tout their ethics and human rights policies, yet the supply chain is still built on poverty. At some point, we have to judge the industry not by what it says but by its actions.
Very insightful article, thank you! It made me think about how little we Western consumers care about child labor and poverty on coffee farms. It's in the news, yet people still flock to Starbucks or generate Nespressos at home. Very good point to ask habitual offenders like Starbucks and Nestlé why their farmers needed to resort to using children to help pick coffee in the first place.
Yeah I think that's the key: why are children helping their parents pick coffee? Big companies like to say that they're paying good prices for the coffee they buy, but clearly that's not really true.
I have travelled the coffee origin globe for decades. I have not once seen young children actually engaged in farm labor. Have I encountered young children present and on the farms themselves? Yes, many times! Hundreds of times probably. But were they working? No. We should approach this debate with heightened global awareness. We should not think of it in narrow terms of what we have available here in the US in the form of child day care! This is not available to coffee farm workers! Their best chances for keeping their children safe is to have them JOIN them on the plantations - where they can actually see and monitor them. Presence on the farms themselves should never be conflated with children actually working on the farms.
Very insightful article, thank you! It made me think about how little we Western consumers care about child labor and poverty on coffee farms. It's in the news, yet people still flock to Starbucks or generate Nespressos at home. Very good point to ask habitual offenders like Starbucks and Nestlé why their farmers needed to resort to using children to help pick coffee in the first place.
Yeah I think that's the key: why are children helping their parents pick coffee? Big companies like to say that they're paying good prices for the coffee they buy, but clearly that's not really true.
Thank you for reading!
Accountability Avoidance, it's what they do best.
Exactly
Very good - reminds me of what Slavoj Zizek says about coffee here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpAMbpQ8J7g
I have travelled the coffee origin globe for decades. I have not once seen young children actually engaged in farm labor. Have I encountered young children present and on the farms themselves? Yes, many times! Hundreds of times probably. But were they working? No. We should approach this debate with heightened global awareness. We should not think of it in narrow terms of what we have available here in the US in the form of child day care! This is not available to coffee farm workers! Their best chances for keeping their children safe is to have them JOIN them on the plantations - where they can actually see and monitor them. Presence on the farms themselves should never be conflated with children actually working on the farms.