Coffee Crisis a Forgotten Issue on Global Agenda

Mario Osava

SAO PAULO, (IPS) - In Haiti a woman must work three days harvesting coffee in order to earn the three dollars Europeans spend on an espresso, says Luc Saintville, a technician with the humanitarian watchdog Oxfam International who is assisting coffee growers in his Caribbean country.

Saintville and other activists, including coffee growers from Brazil, Haiti and Honduras staged a protest -- complete with the standard 100-pound bags (46 kilos) of coffee beans and donkeys carrying more sacks -- at one of the entrances to Anhembi Park, where the eleventh sessions of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD XI) are taking place this week.

They demanded a solution to ''the worse coffee crisis ever -- an issue that has been forgotten in the international agenda,'' Spaniard Gonzalo Fajul, spokesman for Oxfam which is promoting the ''trade with justice'' movement, explained to IPS.

''It is an unprecedented scandal'' what is happening with coffee, because of the 75 billion dollars generated by sales of the final coffee products, the coffee growers see just five or six billion dollars, said UNCTAD Secretary-General Rubens Ricupero as he met with the protesters and expressed solidarity with their cause.

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