International Roast is the stuff they sweep up after making Bushells instant. Pablo is the stuff they sweep up after making International Roast. :yuck:
I know nothing about coffee, but at $4 a pop, I'd be inclined to carry one of these: Gourmet Coffee Press | Thermos
I was worried the skyrocketing price of coffee beans (commodity Price) was going to be an issue. But in reality, the cost of coffee is 20-30c per cup. Even if it doubled, at most, that's still only 60c per cup extra. The real cost of a cup of Cafe' bought coffee is the labour and real estate overheads...and those have been outpacing even the ludicrous incease in coffee prices.
yeah, and not to put too much of a downer on all this but... like in so many other industries, the slaves that pick the stuff from the fields just get the lowest cut of the profits of all. Just enough to survive, if that. Which makes the end-prices all the more ludicrous to me. If anything those doing the hardest work should get a bigger portion...but we know this isn't the way it's played. Then you look at outfits like Starbucks and how much tax they paid (news recently). The world we live in, eh.
^^^ Cocoa (chocolate) has apretty bad economic cost that isn't factored in either. The farmers only get a few crops from freshly cleared rainforest...then it's time to encroach further into the forest.
Serves them right for being lazy fiscal pygmies then Next thing you'll know they'll start bitching about not having enough to buy food to eat as well! The world we live in indeed!
Barter is a situation of direct trading, A gives B what he wants, B gives A what he wants. There is no product that A or B use as inbetween step to what they want. There is no "medium of exchange". With silver, there is. So it's not barter.
I'm not sticking up for the corporates, but look at the value-add. Prime retail sites. Open most hours, food, newspapers, wifi, etc. there is really no true comparison between the cost of the retail cup of coffee and the grower. Fairtrade brands help the consumer choose, but other than that, you are paying for rent, wages, marketing etc, in the main.
What I'm essentially arguing for is more payment for those so that product can actually be grown sustainably and the growers can actually have a proper living wage, for starters. Not so much that coffee is a rip-off (it is) or that other costs don't come into it. I'm well aware that just growing the coffee is not the be-all and end-all of costs, but the proportion of money paid to the growers is truly tragic if you look into it (and the big coffee buyers know it). So is the environmental damage, largely because of this. But this happens whether you're buying jeans, shirt, shoes or that new computer...so it's not something unusual. It's tragic, regardless. Lucky we have the carbon tax to fix the environment.
Umm. They are automatically paid a wage that is better than their next best alternative because they are not actual slaves (except by dint of whatever THEIR government forces on them which we can't really do too much about - but that's a separate discussion). If they could do better selling IT equipment or coffee machines or knitting baby clothes they would presumably do that. Remember that the basic condition of humanity is the exact same as any other species on the planet - namely ABJECT POVERTY. Anything above this is a significant improvement in living standards. You will probably find that in the case of these 3rd-world farmers, the next best alternative may be death by starvation or selling their bodies for significantly riskier or distasteful activities. Every coffee bean that we buy from them benefits them even if it seems like a pittance in your eyes. Unfortunately, as noble sounding as things like Fairtrade seem on the surface, in reality it largely boils down to creating a rent through protectionist policies. Although this may directly benefit the farmers lucky enough to be within the system it disadvantages anyone who is not (i.e. makes their poverty even worse) and like other protectionist policies will probably be to the longer term detriment of even those farmers lucky enough to be within the system. There are much better ways of helping than Fairtrade coffee.
That's clearly not the case in many cases. Many die in their jobs, either through suicide, cancer from the toxic environment and/or depression (and many are making losses they can never recover but have nothing to do but continue). Slavery exists. Very much so. Even when all the economic indicators are compared between countries to justify the slavery and lower wages "out there". Labels like fairtrade and all I have no opinion on except to say I don't trust them, much like I don't buy supermarket organics or free-range which tastes nothing like real home-grown stuff. I made no comment on fairtrade specifically. What we need is more CEOs that understand we are all in this together, essentially. We are supporting slave states, slave countries. That's what we are doing. All the while... Starbucks facing boycott over tax | Mail Online
I think you miss my point about what the alternatives really mean. The Fairtrade rant wasn't really responding to your message sorry, but that's the first reaction to fixing the problem. The (very important) question is whether NOT buying the coffee because it is made by slave states/slave countries helps in any way make their lives better? This is not flippant.
Probably a million different answers to that question based on so many variables. What will make lives better longer-term is not letting the corporations get away with it by not supporting them or their competitors (at all). ie. being as self-sufficient as possible. Because basically anything you can buy en-masse is sourced the same tragic ways these days. Maybe the lives of the producers could be changed if new (fair) opportunities opened up for them, but that would require companies with a (real) conscience, not marketing BS.
