Empathy, dignity, and economy...

Last night, I stayed up late watching the 2006 movie "Black Gold." It is based around a man named Tadesse Meskela. He happens to be the main guy at the OROMIA coffee Cooperative in Ethiopia. His "mission (is) to save his 74,000 struggling coffee farmers from bankruptcy," as the website blackgoldmovie.com says. I watched the movie intently, I watched the farmers in the movie intently, and I watched the British, and American consumers intently.
I see something unnerving in this picture and it starts in that I love coffee. Not just the morning cup, and not the exploits of becoming a "rock-star" barista. I love coffee in that I feel as if I am a part of something that is as old as history. It is in the story of the bean, that the trouble starts. The story that stands behind every coffee bean that is picked and the person that had to pick that bean in order to stay alive.
I must confess that I have only been "in" the coffee industry for about five years now and am by no means an expert, but I am a human and have what I feel to be an immense amount of empathy for other humans. What I have come to learn in my five years, is that in the "industry" of coffee, the people who pick all the coffees from around the world, work for next to nothing in comparison to what their labor produces for others in the chain of coffee consumption. What I mean is this; the average coffee farmer get pennies per pound of coffee sold, and through the normal channels of international trade the coffee comes out on my end in a cafe/roaster setting costing the consumer nearly eleven dollars per pound. The gap is huge. Where does the money go and why are the coffee farmers still living in poverty?
I am by no means going to pretend to be stupid and ignore the fact that there are costs involved in shipping hundreds of thousands of pounds of coffees from all corners of the earth to thousands of other places around the globe, on the contrary, I am very aware. But I am also aware of quality and the debate on Fair Trade vs. not Fair Trade. The debate stems from the fact that the certification by the Fair Trade organization in turn pays the coffee farmers more per pound of coffee than the average non-Fair Trade coffee. This in turn also helps the farmer out by giving them more money to re-invest back into the farms, labor and increase the quality of their lives. The counter point is that the term Fair Trade in no way indicates quality. From the viewpoint that I currently stand, I only want the best coffees that I can buy. Unfortunately, the Fair Trade markets have driven, in some respects, the quality of coffee down by instead of promoting quality coffee, promoting certification by the Fair Trade organization, so that the farmers could get more money by producing an inferior bean.
Writing this, I feel a certain level of guilt. I do feel like coffee farmers need to be paid more, but only a premium to those who dedicate themselves to quality. The comparison that I often reference is that of natural selection. The website Wikipedia.org defines natural selection as "the process where heritable traits that make it more likely for an organism to survive and successfully reproduce become more common over successive generations of a population." In terms of the economy of coffee, when consumers support this "Fair Trade" over quality, they are inhibiting the natural flow of increasing the quality of their crop and therefor inhibiting the farmer from getting paid more for producing quality coffee.
What happens, as I have read, is that instead of all these farmers producing better quality coffees, they work the farm from a mostly "get the job done" perspective, not caring and therefore driving the quality and market for the coffee down. The market is driven down when average quality coffee is taken to the local cooperatives, where they are often mixed together with all the other coffees from the regions where they are harvested. This is really a big thing considering that this will mix all the hard work of the farmers who care with the coffees of the farmers who do not really care. On my end, what this does is gives us, the roasters and the consumers? We end up with coffees that have no merit beyond the Fair Trade certification.
Again I would hate to come off as stupid and ignore the hard work of a few daring souls that are out there really working to increase quality of coffee and quality of life for the farmers. Intelligentsia has created and copyrighted the term "Direct-Trade," where they deal directly with the farmer, but even more recently as written on his personal blog of at dougzell.com, Doug Zell, who basically is Intelligentsia has begun importing coffee and by doing so "are... guaranteeing our growers great prices for great coffees through our pioneering Direct Trade program, but importing and financing our coffee ourselves provides an even greater degree of transparency and logistical control that allows us to land carefully selected Direct Trade coffees months sooner than if we were using outside importers." There is also Stumptown coffee who "pays the highest prices ever seen in these countries in pursuit of these (coffees)." The coffees they purchase are among the best you can buy and are according to their website "the product of a maximum commitment of time, energy and money from our farmers."
My personal problem lies in the question "What can I do to help?" On the small scale roasters side of things, is it possible to really help when the the roaster to go through an importer? Is it possible to help these farmers when it is at this point almost impossible for the average coffee shop to survive? Is it possible to help when misinformation and greed permeates the roots of the coffee industry?

So, last night I watched a movie... It moved me, it changed the way I am thinking about the coffee industry, it has inspired me. It has been a goal of mine for the last year or two to source my own coffee, giving dignity, context, and a face to the coffee farmer, buying directly from him. My hopes are that the industry will change for the better by then. It shouldnt have to be so hard to show you care...