A House Blend Featuring Social, Economic Justice

Lutherans joke that coffee is their third sacrament, just behind the bread and wine of communion.

But the love of java after worship services is hardly unique to Lutherans. For decades, places of worship have harnessed coffee’s powers to bring people together -- long before Starbucks turned it into a business strategy.

This yen for caffeine among the faithful, combined with a divine command to help the poor, has created a thriving market for “fair-trade” coffee. This product is sold at above-market prices to give small farmers in developing nations a better chance at a sustainable life.

From 2001 to 2003, Interfaith Coffee Program sales in the United States increased 233%, according to statistics from Equal Exchange, a for-profit coffee buyer that instituted the program. More than 400,000 pounds were bought last year by religious groups, and this year’s sales are far ahead of that pace, Equal Exchange officials said.

“The numbers are taking off incredibly,” said Anna Utech, a program coordinator with Equal Exchange, a worker-owned cooperative based in Massachusetts. “When people of faith learn about the farmers’ suffering, they feel a special call to respond.”

To keep those growers in business, fair-trade deals guarantee a price of $1.41 per pound for organic coffee and $1.26 for nonorganic -- paid directly to farmer cooperatives. This compares with about 80 cents for regularly traded coffee, a price that also pays the middlemen along the distribution chain.

The fair-trade market has dramatically expanded in recent years as small farmers in Central and South America, Asia and Africa have suffered from plummeting prices on the open market, and socially conscious coffee drinkers have elected to pay more to keep them in business.

Including faith-based groups and other charitable and commercial efforts, 18.7 million pounds of fair-trade coffee was sold in 2003, nearly a 100% increase from the year before. The Third World farmers received additional revenue of $16 million from fair-trade coffee sales.

Despite its growth, fair-trade coffee’s $208 million in retail sales remains a sliver of the $5-billion coffee industry. Religious leaders say they are not discouraged; they have the patience to change the social conscience of their congregants one cup of gourmet joe at a time.

They believe their congregations have the collective power to bring economic well being to poor growers and their villages -- all for about 2 additional cents per cup of coffee for Fellowship Blend.

“We’re taught that what we consume and the way we act in the world needs to be consistent with the values of our tradition,” said Rabbi Josh Zweiback of Congregation Beth Am, a Reform synagogue in Los Altos in Northern California.

“Fair-trade coffee is a perfect fit.”

The first denominationwide push into the fair-trade coffee market began in 1996 when officials with Lutheran World Relief, in partnership with Equal Exchange, started a pilot program.

Fair-trade coffee was an ideal subject matter for Lutherans because of the traditional connection between church fellowship and coffee, said Brenda Meier, who directs the Lutheran World Relief coffee project.

“As Christians, our faith should be threaded through every area of our lives,” she said. “It was an easy link to explore how our lives as Christians can be lived out by the choices we make in the coffee we drink.”

In recent years, the Lutherans have been formally joined by eight Christian denominations -- including Roman Catholic, Presbyterian Church (USA) and United Methodist -- under the umbrella of the Equal Exchange’s Interfaith Coffee Program. Organizers said they hope to sign up branches of Judaism to complement individual synagogues already in the program.

Other fair-trade coffee suppliers work with individual faith-based groups, but Equal Exchange has the largest coordinated program.

Those in the Interfaith Coffee Program are provided with a variety of materials, including church bulletin inserts complete with graphics, fundraising ideas and profiles of farming families the program helps.

Lutherans maintain a large lead when it comes to buying fair-trade coffee. More than 99 tons of coffee was sold this year to 4,100 Lutheran churches in the United States. Their campaign slogan: “Pour Justice to the Brim.”

Lutheran World Relief even produced a 28-minute video, “Grounds for Hope,” to be used as a sales tool.

Buoyed by the Lutherans’ success, Catholic Relief Services signed on last year, hoping to get 10% of America’s 19,000 Catholic parishes to serve fair-trade coffee.

The website for Catholic Relief Services offers a virtual tour of the farmland in Nicaragua that produces some of the fair-trade coffee.

The photographs were taken by staff members who traveled there to meet the growers they were helping.

“This is an opportunity for Catholics to apply their faith outside of Mass on Sunday,” said Michael Sheridan, fair-trade program officer for Catholic Relief Services. “It is a daily habit that allows people to help stop the exploitation of their brothers and sisters overseas.”

Holy Family Church in South Pasadena has made the switch to fair-trade coffee for its staffers, and hopes to take the program parishwide.

Allis Druffle, the parish’s director of community services, said the concept of fair-trade coffee parallels Catholic teaching on social justice, which includes the right to a just wage and to consider the good of workers in addition to profit.

“It’s just something anyone can do,” Druffle said.

“People may think, ‘What’s a few more cents a cup going to do?’ Well, it does a lot. It’s pretty powerful what we as individuals can do, even if we don’t see it first hand.”