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Student documentary on Fair Trade coffee premieres

March  6, 2008

Six students from the College of Saint Benedict, St. Joseph, and Saint John’s University, Collegeville, have filmed a documentary on Fair Trade coffee which will premiere at 7 p.m. March 12 at Pellegrene Auditorium, SJU. An encore showing is at 7 p.m. March 13 at Pellegrene Auditorium, SJU.

The documentary, Somos de Café (“We Are Coffee”) is free and open to the public.

The students traveled to Guatemala in January for a 10-day period of interviews and filming, said Andrea Carrow, a CSB junior from Marshall, Minn. The title of the documentary comes from an interview with a worker at local fincas (Spanish for coffee plantations).

“We asked the laborer how long he had worked there,” Carrow said. “He said he had worked there all his life, and he said his father had worked there before him, and his father before that, and his father before that. He finally said, ‘Somos de café,’ suggesting that his origins are from the local plantation.”

The SJU students involved in the project include: Brian Essling, senior, Duluth, Minn.; Adam Spooner, senior, Fargo, N.D.; Andrew Vavra, senior, Apple Valley, Minn.; Nathaniel Ptacek, senior, Green Bay, Wis.; and Jose Galeano, sophomore, San Salvador, El Salvador. David Slifka, a senior from Plover, Wis., is the producer of the documentary, although he did not visit Guatemala with the group.

Three of the students (Carrow, Essling and Spooner) studied in Guatemala during spring semester 2007 as part of the schools’ study abroad program. While there, Essling and Spooner worked in a fair-trade cooperative office.

When the students returned to central Minnesota, they talked about ways to help that would have a long-term educational aspect - rather than simply volunteering for a week or two – through Students in Free Enterprise (SIFE), a club at CSB/SJU that promotes awareness of the free enterprise system.

“We, with the help of the cooperative, decided our role was not to volunteer in the plantations, as that would only have a short-term effect, but to come back and educate people (in Minnesota) about this issue,” Carrow said. “Our mission is to generate awareness about Fair Trade coffee and other global issues. Our vision is that this will affect people to do something about this.”

The United States consumes one-fifth of the world's coffee, making it the largest consumer in the world. It is a commodity that is second on the world market only to crude oil. But few Americans realize that agriculture workers in the coffee industry often toil in what can be described as "sweatshops in the fields," according to Global Exchange, a Web site devoted to global economy issues. Many small coffee farmers receive prices for their coffee that are less than the costs of production, forcing them into a cycle of poverty and debt.

Fair Trade coffee assures consumers that coffee is purchased under fair conditions. To become Fair Trade certified, an importer must meet stringent international criteria; paying a minimum price per pound of $1.26, providing much needed credit to farmers, and providing technical assistance such as help transitioning to organic farming, according to the Web site.

The students edited and assembled the documentary with assistance from The Project for Under-Told Stories at SJU. The goal is to show the film at schools, churches and organizations around the region, Carrow said.