Think Globally, Drink Coffee Locally: Fair Trade Coffee And Student Activism
- Topics:
- Global Strategy
- Tags:
- Beverage,
- SFT,
- Real Estate,
- Manufacturing,
- Free Trade,
- Food & Beverage,
- Finance,
- Fair Trade,
- Coffee,
- Business Operations,
- ...
- Source:
- Western Washington University
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Overview: This article focuses on Students for Fair Trade (SFT), a group at Western Washington University attempting to increase resource flows to coffee farmers in Less Developed Countries (LDCs). SFT’s goal is to shift university coffee purchasing towards products certified to provide minimum prices to democratically run growers’ cooperatives. SFT has achieved notable success, with the adoption of fair trade regular drip coffee in all campus cafes. The group’s long-term goal of shifting the campus to 100% fair trade certified regular, decaffeinated and espresso coffees in cafes and cafeterias is still being pursued, with some major obstacles remaining. This article considers SFT in the context of literature on domestic and transnational social movements and of the broader fair trade movement. It concludes that fair trade coffee represents a model for win-win connections between wealthy northern consumers and LDC farmers. Further, it suggests those universities represent a promising context for such organizing since college graduates socialized in favor of free trade are likely to serve roles as high earning consumers and managers in the private and public sector—potential agents of normative change.
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Format: PDF | Size: 83KB | Date: Mar 2002 | Pages: 29
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