Moving 90-Ton Mountain of Fair Trade Coffee: Parishes Make Strong Start

Baltimore, November 7, 2003 — A year-long bid to double Lutheran support for fair trade with small-scale farmers is off to a strong start. In just the first month of the '90 Ton Challenge,' Lutheran parishes and individuals purchased 16,000 pounds (eight tons) of fairly traded coffee through the LWR Coffee Project. The Women of the ELCA are sponsoring the challenge.

"It's very exciting to see how many folks are doing holiday bazaars with the coffee, plus fair trade tea and cocoa. It's a good start, a 51 percent increase over last October," said Erbin Crowell of Equal Exchange, LWR's fair trade coffee partner organization.

"There is good growth in the number of parishes active in the project during the month of October - 590 parishes compared to 376 last year," said Brenda Meier, who manages the project for LWR. The total number of congregations in the LWR Coffee Project is now 3,400, also an increase, she noted.

"As parishes join the challenge we are encouraging them to find out more about why fair trade coffee is so good for farmers," Meier said. A fresh look at the benefits of fair trade, Fair Trade and Human Rights: The Perfect Combination, is available on-line at www.lwr.org/fairtrade and in the September issue of the LWR newsletter TOTO.

For three years the price of coffee on the world market has been so low that small coffee farmers cannot make a living from coffee. Fair trade, meanwhile, has kept tens of thousands of coffee farmers in business.