Everything but the Coffee (33 page)

By the 1990s, Katzeff took his social activist streak to Rwanda. These days he pays former Hutu and Tutsi farmers, deadly foes a decade ago who are now working together in cooperatives, as much as $1.90 per pound—or more than 60 cents above the fair trade price—for green beans. He charges his customers $11.50 for twelve ounces of this coffee. In other words, he spends 25 percent more than Starbucks on the beans (and knows exactly what farmers are getting the money) and charges almost 50 percent less than Starbucks for the product. On top of that, he gives money to schools in coffee-growing areas where he buys from and donates “a portion of the profits from each package sold to the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund to preserve and protect mountain gorillas in Rwanda.”
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In contrast, Starbucks is “buying from the already rich,” an angry Katzeff told me. In a much calmer voice, Dan Clay told the same story. “Starbucks bought almost exclusively from privately owned enterprises, from fairly wealthy investors . . . at the washing stations.” Again, Starbucks officials essentially confirmed Clay’s version of the story. “Coffee is grown by small holders,” Audrey Lincoff, a Starbucks public relations person wrote to me when I asked for clarification, “and delivered to washing stations.” In other words, Starbucks buys the coffee for
less than Katzeff and gets it through some big players, but mostly from middlemen who certainly take a percentage off the top before paying farmers. But again, that wasn’t the message delivered to U.S. customers. I was led to believe from the in-store signs and press releases that the company’s Rwandan Black Apron coffee would help the little guy— small-scale farmers and the survivors of the 1990s killing sprees in this distressed corner of the world.

At a Starbucks outlet near Penn Station in Manhattan, I found a brochure explaining that Starbucks awarded fifteen thousand dollars to local communities whose coffee got selected as a Black Apron Exclusive. Grants funded projects in environmental protection, education, transportation, and improving coffee-processing facilities. After it developed its Rwanda Blue Bourbon coffee, Starbucks awarded fifteen thousand dollars to the towns of Karengera and Gatare where the washing stations it got its beans from were located. “The money,” a company press release said, “will be used to make immediate improvements to these station communities, improving efficiency and coffee quality, ultimately ensuring that farmers who use these stations will realize higher quality coffee and obtain higher prices for their crops.”
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While the company hinted that this money would help Rwandan farmers—who on their own purchased cows to supplement their diets and provide natural fertilizer from the money they earned from selling to Western coffee companies—the direct grants helped Starbucks and its private sector supporters the most. Money to “improve efficiency” was not exactly a gift. There was no guarantee that these funds would trickle down to farmers or lead to better health care for their families or save endangered wildlife. Surely this kind of giving—just like buying from the already well-heeled—doesn’t change the balance of power on the ground in the poorer corners of the world. Actually, it translated into an investment— paid for by consumers of the pricey Black Apron coffee—in Rwanda’s coffee infrastructure. If the country could produce more coffee, farmers would probably be better off, but also Starbucks would have another source of beans, something the company was constantly on the lookout
for as it opened a new store every six hours in the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century. All the better if the beans came with a compelling narrative.
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NEWBORN UNIVERSALISM

“A Better Living for Farmers,” announced the sign at the Starbucks by Penn Station, equals “Better Coffee for You.” Hammering home the point, Starbucks in another sign reminded customers, “You can feel good about your choice of Starbucks because we work together with farmers to improve their livelihood . . . it’s how we do business every day.” Again the message is, we can have it all: better coffee and better foreign relations. It says, moreover, that buying right can get
you
esteem and the very best products at the same time. In Starbucks’ version of globalization, everyone—the company, the customer, and the small grower (in that order)—wins. Starbucks gets more coffee and higher profits (without, by the way, having to deal with government regulations); customers get high-quality, better-tasting drinks made from clean, safe beans; and growers get the money that trickles down to their farms. But, most important, consumers get to feel better about them-selves and the state of the world. For this, Starbucks reasons, it can charge a premium. The evidence suggests customers will pay this fee as long as the company’s image holds up.

Many of us, it seems, will pay extra for global peace of mind, a desire that has gained added value in recent years. In 2006, University of Munich and London School of Economics sociology professor Ulrich Beck talked about how 9/11 and other events influenced American ideas about globalization. “A strange kind of discourse has developed in the United States,” he observed. “The idea appears to be that it is necessary to turn everyone into Americans, so that Americans are able to live in safety in a world without borders.”
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Starbucks is doing its part to calm anxieties in the United States about conflicting global values systems. With stores from Canberra to Chicago,
the company appears to be everywhere. And of course, every Starbucks is predictably the same—the stores look alike and the drinks taste the same. Latte drinkers in Bali and Baltimore all can imagine themselves, if they want, doing the exact same thing as others like them around the world. For some, this suggests a kind of reassuring cultural common ground. Starbucks’ presence everywhere middle-class men and women gather means that we, the collective middle, are all the same, that we all want the exact same things.

The Starbucks farmers’ stories—the corpumentaries—echo this reassuring message by creating another imaginary cultural bridge bringing people together. All of the tales follow a similar narrative path. At the start, we aren’t, the stories suggest, the same. Highlighting this theme, each opens with a scene in a colorful, crowded colonial plaza or in a rustic, remote mountainside village. Traditional music swells in the back-ground. Locals sing and dance, reenacting some older, foreign ritual. The subjects aren’t quite modern—and that is the point.

By the end of the films, however, the local communities have changed. By paying higher prices, dispensing expert advice, and contributing to washing stations and schools, Starbucks has helped transform these places. Locals pay tribute and bear witness to the power of the caring corporation. They talk in their native tongues about sending their kids to college or taking care of the planet or sanitizing their villages; in other words, they talk just like any middle-class person sitting in a Starbucks somewhere would talk.

Take the case of Mario Sanchez. The owner of an eleven-acre coffee farm in southern Costa Rica—hardly “small” by Latin American standards, where many families work plots a third of this size—talks in one film about his relationship with Starbucks. (His farm, by the way, is part of an even larger family operation with more than one hundred acres of coffee fields.) “The principal benefit,” he insists, “isn’t money; it is family harmony, the good relations in each of our homes, the fact that our children are studying in primary schools, high schools, and the university—this is worth more than money.” With the farm’s success, the nar
rator continues, “the first Sanchez ever went off to college last year, a rare event. Two more cousins followed this year.” One of those college students appears on screen and says in perfect English that she wants to give back to her community. Then, the narrator jumps in and explains, “The cooperative [seemingly the larger family farm, not a collective of small farmers] is now setting aside money so that others can go to college as well.” In yet another corpumentary, the wife of a Starbucks coffee farmer “proudly” displays the family’s gleaming new bathroom with running water and an overhead shower. In Spanish, she says, “It’s great, like rich people have.”

A Starbucks in-store sign tells the same story of post-9/11 reassuring universality in another way. “Here’s wishing you ‘wholehearted happiness,’ ” says a well-dressed, healthy-looking woman standing next to a field of coffee plants. Below the picture, the poster reads, “That’s what ‘muan jai’ means in North Thailand. The hill tribe farmers there speak in a unique dialect, but the terrific coffee they produce is universal. Try a cup and you will understand.”

Starbucks’ stories about peaceful and profitable globalization turn on these testimonials to widely shared values, tastes, and goals. Economic progress is not about struggle and conflict, political mobilization and strategy; it is about mutual respect and shared cultural values. As the films and posters implicitly argue, we are all, in the end, the same. Country singer and hawk Toby Keith, World Trade Organization protesters, and the 9/11 bombers are the aberrations. The rest of us want the similar things. We want cleaner rivers, bluer skies, and unspoiled vistas. We want our children to go to school and learn. We want better health care. We want tasty and healthy things to eat and drink. But mostly we want to get ahead, and we want our children to get ahead; we want to have what the rich have. And we don’t want extreme or radical solutions. We don’t need the government or pesky regulations to solve things. Starbucks, the Gap, the Body Shop, and other caring companies can get the job done. The private becomes the political; the corporation becomes the state.

Reassurance and deliverance, though, don’t come cheap. Filling in for the government, Starbucks taxes us, to feel better about the world and better about what we didn’t do in Rwanda in the 1990s and what we aren’t doing now. Buying a latte, then, is bit like the selling of absolution in the Middle Ages. Those with money get saved.

GLOBALIZATION ON THE GROUND

“You sound really mad,” a source said to me halfway through an interview as I asked him about Starbucks’ coffee moves in Rwanda. Years before, I had read Peter Gourevitch’s
We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda
. This grim book left me feeling empty and lost. I felt bad about what happened there, bad about how little the U.S. government had done, and bad, I suppose, about how little I had done—not even really keeping up with the story in the newspapers and trying to understand what was happening there. I guess that sense of guilt made me initially intrigued by Starbucks’ claims to be helping the little guy in Rwanda. By the time I first heard this, I had already become skeptical about the company’s pronouncements and corporate self-mythology, and I certainly didn’t see Starbucks, or most other corporations, as paragons of virtue. I was a few years into my research and past thinking of Starbucks as the corner bar for a new era and a force of good around the globe. But still, the Rwandan story caught me off guard. I guess I thought there were limits, even for corporations and what they were willing to sell. Abused by generations of colonial terror and theft, and years of bad government and even worse policies, Rwandan farmers seemed to be just about the most vulnerable people in the world. After years of poverty and violence, if anyone deserved a break, they did. Was Starbucks really willing to manipulate the Rwandan tragedy and Western guilt, however misplaced, about the killing there for its own ends—and to do so without really helping the people it implied it was helping?

I didn’t start out this project thinking I needed to go to the first link in the coffee chain. After all, I was studying how Americans consumed, not how markets worked. That was a different, though certainly important, project. Clearly, however, if I wanted to get to the bottom of the Rwandan story, I needed to see how things looked from the ground up. For months, I tried to figure out how I could get to the Central African country and gain access to coffee growers there. Kimberly Easson, a fair-trade activist, sponsored trips to Rwanda, but they left only once a year and for two weeks in the middle of the semester. I couldn’t leave my classes for that long. Still, I felt like I needed to learn more of the details behind the stories Starbucks told in its posters, brochures, and corpumentaries. After some checking around, I decided to go to Nicaragua instead.

Matching its Rwandan promises, Starbucks, wrote an author some-what sympathetic to the company in 2008, was “investing time and money to facilitate a comeback of the Nicaraguan coffee industry, decimated in the 1980s when American-backed Contra soldiers pillaged rural communities, murdered citizens, and chased farmers off the land.”
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To learn more about the country’s coffee economy, I lined up interviews with fair-trade supporters, trade unionists, small and mid-sized farmers, representatives of NGOs and farm cooperatives, and exporters and dry mill owners. Whether they grew coffee for Starbucks or not, everyone had something to say about the company and how it shaped their country’s coffee markets.

A few weeks before I left for the trip, I met with the son of one of Nicaragua’s most powerful coffee families at a Starbucks on the University of Pennsylvania campus, where he was studying business at the Wharton School. Halfway between the front door and the cash register stood a four-sided display rack filled with coffees from around the world. At the top, a sign poked out like a cardboard church steeple. It said something about better livings for farmers and pictured a coffee grower. He looked like a Latino version of the Marlboro Man. Dressed in a denim shirt and straw cowboy hat, the man on the poster had a square-jawed, bronze-tinted face and thick, powerful hands. He
embodied earthy simplicity and rugged individualism, just the type of family farmer that the rural romanticism so popular in the United States holds up and celebrates. He is exactly the kind of little guy that so many want to see prosper in the global economy, and, in turn, like Americans.

In March 2007, I went to Nicaragua hoping to find this Latino Marlboro Man and understand how Starbucks operated at its origin. During the trip, coffee growers and community activists told me about Santiago Rivera. Turns out he looked the part. The fifty-year-old coffee farmer and father of six from Somoto in northern Nicaragua had strong, calloused hands and a slight but powerful frame. He wore a neat, thinning shirt, and, of course, a cowboy hat. He wasn’t a perfect match for the Marlboro Man. His boxy mocha-colored face was etched from side to side with deep lines, making him look older than the billboard-perfect cigarette slinger from Madison Avenue. Rivera, however, came by his lines honestly through hard work in the hot sun and years of constant worry.