When you pay for a cup of coffee at Starbucks or any other coffee shop, you might pay around $3 or up to $10 for a single drink. The farmer only gets under 10 cents, usually around 5 cents. According to fairtrade.net farmers earn with $1 per pound of coffee only half the living wage. With 1.40 per pound the farmers operate under the poverty line.
What can we do to help the farmers? The easiest thing is to buys fair-trade coffee, even at the coffee shop. It’s not always more expensive, as the coffee price itself makes up a very small portion of your drink.
For my part, I invest only in organic fair trade coffee. If it seems too expensive and I cannot afford it, I simply don’t buy coffee. Coffee is not a necessity, even though the coffee addictions would not subscribe to it. I would rather buy something else, that is worth the money to me, like cacao or cashews, and the farmers can live of it.
Image: Visual Capitalist