Mon Apr 11 2011
You're invited to join us for the Australian launch of Our Mission Coffee!
When: Tuesday, April 19, 2011, 6.30pm.
Where: Bruce Lynton BMW Showroom, 84 Nerang Street, Southport, QLD, 4215
RSVP to zoe@jetzpr.com or 0402 886 614
For more details or to order Our Mission Coffee, visit http://www.freedom.ourmissioncoffee.com/
To access the flyer for the launch, just click here....
OMC-launch-19411.pdf
The "Bean History"
Coffee has a mysterious history, with several apocryphal stories as to how it was discovered. The word "coffee" itself originates from the Turkish language from a phrase meaning "the wine of the bean."
It is believed that the discovery of the coffee bean itself happened first in Ethiopia with a goat herder who noticed the 'dancing' of his goats when they ate some of the red coffee berries. He took some back to his village leaders and they, disapproving, threw the beans into the fire. As the berries burned in the fire the enticing aroma of roasting coffee beans came out and they scraped the beans out of the fire, ground them up and put them in water.
Whether this story is true is hard to determine, but we know that coffee has now become one of the most popular drinks in the world and the second highest traded commodity globally.
Slavery Lurking Behind the Aroma
Most of us, though, are not all that concerned with the history or chemistry of coffee. Most of us are content so long as the market shelves, coffee shops and restaurants remain well stocked with affordable varieties of this favoured beverage.
But much of that is shifting as more and more light is cast on the cocoa and coffee industry. There is more information coming out, in riveting detail, profiling young boys who were tricked into slavery, or sold as slaves, to Ivory Coast cocoa and coffee farmers. There are 600,000 farms in Ivory Coast which together, account for one-third of the nation's entire economy.
An investigative report by the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) indicated the size of the problem. According to the BBC, hundreds of thousands of children are being purchased from their parents for a pittance or, in some cases, outright stolen and shipped to the Ivory Coast, where they are sold as slaves to cocoa and coffee farms. These children typically come from countries such as Mali, Burkina Faso and Togo. Destitute parents in these poverty-stricken lands sell their children to traffickers believing that they will find honest work once they arrive in Ivory Coast and then send some of their earnings home. But that's not what happens. These children, usually 12 to14 years old (and sometimes younger), are forced to do hard manual labour 80 to 100 hours a week. They are paid nothing, are barely fed, beaten regularly and are often viciously beaten if they try to escape. Most will never see their families again.
The Our Mission Coffee Crusade: Good Coffee Doing Good™
Although it is chocolate that has had the most publicity of late, chocolate isn't the only American staple produced by slaves. Some coffee beans are also tainted by slavery. In addition to producing nearly half of the world's cocoa, Ivory Coast is the world's fourth-largest grower of coffee.
Often, coffee and cocoa are grown together on the same farm. The tall cacao trees shade the shorter coffee bushes. On some Ivory Coast farms, child slaves harvest coffee beans as well as the cacao pods that yield cocoa beans. More than 7000 tonnes of Ivory Coast coffee arrives in the US each year.
Some coffee industry executives acknowledge the use of slaves, but say the labour issue isn't their concern.
"This industry isn't responsible for what happens in a foreign country," said one representative of the National Coffee Association, which represents the companies that make Folgers, Maxwell House, Nescafe and other brands.
Neither Folgers nor Maxwell House responded to inquiries about the origins of their coffee. Past shipping records, though, showed that on a given day, 337 tons of Ivory Coast coffee beans were sent to Folgers through Houston, Texas.
The US is the world's largest consumer of both chocolate and coffee. In fact, coffee is the second largest legal US import — after oil. Fortunately, there is considerable momentum developing in this country and elsewhere behind the emergence of Fair Trade coffee.
According to the San Francisco-based Global Exchange, "The best way to prevent child labour in the fields is to pay workers a living wage… Most people in this country would rather buy a cup of coffee picked under fair trade conditions than sweatshop slave-labour conditions.
"The problem is, most people do not even realise where their coffee comes from or how it is grown and purchased. We are out to change this! Fair Trade Certified Coffee was the first product introduced in the United States with an independently monitored system to ensure that it was produced under fair labour conditions… To become Fair Trade certified, an importer must meet stringent international criteria (including) paying a minimum price per pound of $1.26." (This figure is from April 2010)
Our Mission Coffee proudly pays Premium Fair Trade pricing to our farmers. In fact, the lowest price we are currently paying for a pound of our coffee is $2.15. We truly want to be a blessing to those who provide our excellent coffee!
Did you know that over 50% of Americans over 18 years of age drink coffee every day? This represents over 150 million daily drinkers in the US alone yet organic coffee accounted for only 3% of all coffee sold in the US and Fair Trade accounts for only 1% of worldwide sales. [Source: Food and Agriculture Organization study of the United Nations published September 2009].
Our Mission Coffee is out to change this by paying a fair wage to the growers who provide only the finest, freshest and healthiest grown coffee through our 100% Organic, Premium Fair Trade "Direct to You" model.
For more details or to order Our Mission Coffee, visit http://www.freedom.ourmissioncoffee.com/
Cutting Out the Middleman
Fair Trade, whether it's coffee or chocolate, means an equitable partnership between consumers in North America and producers in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean.
It means that farmers' co-operatives around the world can count on a stable and reliable living wage. When consumers purchase Fair Trade coffee or chocolate, they know that their money is going to local farmers where it is then invested in health care, education, environmental stewardship, community development and economic independence. They know it's not going to enrich CEOs making tens of millions of dollars annually.
This is important because destitute farmers are struggling to survive and even resorting to child slavery, while CEO's of Coffee Mega-giants like Sara Lee, Starbucks and Philip Morris (owns the Maxwell House brand) are earning 8 and 9 figure incomes.
It is not easy for most consumers to stomach the contrast between exorbitant salaries such as these and the gruesome reality of slave labor. Nor is it easy to swallow the reality of such excess when millions of coffee and cocoa farmers around the world who depend on their harvests to provide for their families are facing debt and starvation. There seems to be something particularly hideous about making this kind of money on the backs of the world's poorest people.
It may not be fair. But we are free to make changes! We are deciding not to concentrate on the inequities. We are deciding to do our part to create change.
The world is not fair, but we are FREE to make changes!
You will never hear Our Mission Coffee complaining about the creation of wealth or men and women creating unlimited wealth for themselves. We do, however, want to ensure that this wealth is not being created on the backs of slave labour. We believe there is enough for everyone in this world we live in. We do not, however, want to profit extravagantly while members of our human family are not able to create a fair wage for themselves growing our coffee.
That is why the foundation of our company is based on our copyrighted CoffeeIQ standards. The CoffeeIQ shows the Impact Quotient of our coffee purchasing on the farms and farmers' lives where we purchase our coffee and the Income Quotient illustrates the Income Quotient on the lives of those who join our crusade.
Quite simply, Our Mission Coffee is selling coffee like no one else in the world. We have created a Direct to You model sharing coffee through a Co-operative Marketing Network, involving people sharing coffee with their coffee-loving friends. In essence, by doing this we all get to be personally involved in the crusade of Good Coffee Doing Good™!
When you join Our Mission Coffee Club, you are making your presence felt in the coffee world. You are guaranteeing that farmers are compensated at Premium Fair Trade pricing for their efforts. You are communicating that you care how this world is governed, how industry is conducted and how business can transform everyone involved.
Not only is Our Mission Coffee making a difference, we offer coffee as fresh as it possibly can be.
We not only are selling fairly purchased coffee, but we are selling the freshest coffee most have ever tasted. We get the green beans direct from our farming co-operatives, shipped straight to our small batch roasters, roast and package all of our coffee by hand, then ship them within 24 hours of roasting. You have them on your doorstep often within 2 days of it having arrived in the green form to our roasters! Simply the best coffee you can experience and you can know it is Good Coffee Doing Good™!
NOTE: "Source material for this article came from internationally acclaimed food author John Robbins."
For more details or to order Our Mission Coffee, visit http://www.freedom.ourmissioncoffee.com/
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