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.Few Starbucks coffees have their own brochures, but the fair-trade blend does.At one store, I saw a chalkboard sign over a basket of fair-trade-certified beans that said, “Help the helpless.” On dozens of occasions, I have walked into Starbucks stores, especially near college campuses, and seen bags of the company’s fair-trade coffee stacked near the door.I didn’t think much about this at first.Then I read Paco Underhill’s perceptive book, Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping.He doesn’t recommend that businesses put items they want to move quickly next to the main entry point.Customers, he explains, aren’t ready to buy when they first walk into a place.At that point, they need a moment to transition and focus.13 When I talked with Underhill, I asked him why, given this widely recognized shopping dynamic, some companies still put merchandise by the front entrance.“This isn’t a selling place,” he reiterated.“It is a place to announce something.to plant an idea.” I asked him what Starbucks was trying to convey with those bags of fair-trade beans by the door.He answered rather tersely, “You will have to ask Starbucks.”Starbucks named its fair-trade coffee, a blend of Central American and East African beans, Café Estima.This is another clue to the company’s approach to globalization.In Spanish estima means “esteem.” But who gets the esteem? According to José Alvarez, a Venezuelan born-scholar of Cuban literature who runs study abroad programs in Latin America, the farmer pictured on the label could be the one getting the esteem.Just as likely to earn the esteem, he told me, given how Starbucks uses the word, are the customers.Through buying the blend, they get to say something about themselves and how they want to be seen.They say that they are the kind of people who care about the least fortunate and have enough money to spend to give poor farmers in some distant place a boost.But they also get to dissociate themselves, and show their innocence, from the causes of those same farmers’ poverty and the discontent that goes with that situation.By buying fair-trade coffee, they are doing their small part to reduce global inequities and give, in Starbucks’ words, “farming families a better life and insure coffee farms are protected for the future.”14 For that, Starbucks tells them through the name of its coffee blend, others should hold them in high esteem, or estima.Beginning in 2001, Starbucks made it easier—or so it said—to spread the esteem and do a little something to reduce global inequities.That year the company debuted its own in-house sourcing system.In many ways, it amounted to a corporate takeover of fair trade.According to Starbucks, the company “saw a need for it”—it apparently being a system that paid farmers more money that wasn’t the fair-trade system already in place.Developed in tandem with Conservation International and Scientific Certification Systems, Coffee and Farmer Equity Practices, commonly known as CAFE Practices, explains the company Web site, established “guidelines.to help us work with farmers to ensure higher quality coffee and private [my emphasis] equitable relationships with farmers, workers and communities as well as protect the environment.” Under the plan, growers first had to show that they could produce consistently high-quality coffee.Knowing that some consumers associated fair trade with bad coffee (consumers got this idea, in part, from Starbucks), Starbucks stressed the taste of CAFE Practices beans at every turn.After demonstrating the quality of their products, growers must fill out stacks of paper, showing how they treat their workers, harvest their beans, and interact with the environment.Auditors then come out to the farms to look at how the farmers handle the beans, deal with agrochemicals, house their workers and families, and regulate things like child labor.Based on the reports, Starbucks grades each farm according to twenty-eight separate categories to determine a score from 1 to 100.Growers with the highest marks receive, the company reports, “preferred buying, higher prices, and better contracts.” Starbucks executives are dedicated to their system.While in 2007, only 6 percent of the company’s coffee came from fair-trade-certified farmers, 65 percent of the more than 360 million pounds of green beans Starbucks purchased came from growers enrolled in CAFE Practices.15According to Starbucks, consumers in the developed world are, of course, the chief beneficiaries of CAFE Practices.Again, the sourcing system ensures quality first, telling creative class customers that they can have it all: richer, deeper, and more complex blends; happier, healthier, better-paid, and politically tamed workers; and a cleaner and more sustainable environment.All you have to do is pick the right product from the right company—“a company doing,” according to its Web site, “business in a different way.” But to get this access—and the esteem that goes with it—you have to pay an added premium, one that isn’t necessarily passed down to the people on the ground.THE ETHOS OF PAYING TO FEEL GOODCommodity prices—how much farmers get for coffee—aren’t the only issues plaguing families in the developing world.Many struggle to find clean, drinkable water.Coffee farmers have it worse than most.The waste from the sticky red coating around just-picked beans can be toxic and if not properly handled pollute the water supply [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]