MCC US Coffee Projext

MCC U.S. Coffee Project is encouraging congregations to use fairly traded coffee during their times of fellowship. As congregations learn more about this project they will learn that this is not just a cup of coffee, it is a cup of justice. The past year has been devastating for small coffee farmers and their families. As they continue to struggle with historically low world coffee prices, coffee farmers in Nicaragua, El Salvador and other coffee growing countries have lost their land and many out-of-work coffee pickers and their families are going hungry. The good news is that nearly 7,000 places of worship and religious organizations across the country have joined with Equal Exchange and their partners in building Fair Trade for small farmers. Note that the kind of coffee you use is very important.

When buying Fair Trade Certified coffee the cost of your cup of coffee may be higher but you can be sure that the people who grew the coffee were paid a fair price. There are several companies who sell Fair Trade Certified coffee, one of them is Equal Exchange, a profitable and still growing 17 year old company that imports 100% of their coffee, tea, and cocoa under Fair Trade terms. In 2003 they will import approximately 3 million pounds of Fair Trade Certified coffee. In comparison Proctor & Gamble (Millstone coffee) has a goal of purchasing 1% of their coffee under Fair Trade terms which may be 2 to 3 million pounds per year, but with no time line given for that amount. MCC U.S. Coffee Project is encouraging congregations to use fairly traded coffee during their times of fellowship. As congregations learn more about this project they will learn that this is not just a cup of coffee, it is a cup of justice.

The past year has been devastating for small coffee farmers and their families. As they continue to struggle with historically low world coffee prices, coffee farmers in Nicaragua, El Salvador and other coffee growing countries have lost their land and many out-of-work coffee pickers and their families are going hungry. The good news is that nearly 7,000 places of worship and religious organizations across the country have joined with Equal Exchange and their partners in building Fair Trade for small farmers. Note that the kind of coffee you use is very important. When buying Fair Trade Certified coffee the cost of your cup of coffee may be higher but you can be sure that the people who grew the coffee were paid a fair price. There are several companies who sell Fair Trade Certified coffee, one of them is Equal Exchange, a profitable and still growing 17 year old company that imports 100% of their coffee, tea, and cocoa under Fair Trade terms. In 2003 they will import approximately 3 million pounds of Fair Trade Certified coffee. In comparison Proctor & Gamble (Millstone coffee) has a goal of purchasing 1% of their coffee under Fair Trade terms which may be 2 to 3 million pounds per year, but with no time line given for that amount.

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Actions and Resources

Become part of the MCC U.S. Coffee Project. For more information check www.mcc.org or call our office at (574) 534-4133. Purchase fairly traded coffee for your congregational and household use from Equal Exchange. There are Fellowship Blend regular and decaffeinated percolator coffees available. Ten Thousand Villages Stores sell fairly traded coffee, teas, cocoa and chocolate bars and also have information on this project. Please notify the clerk at your local Ten Thousand Villages store that your congregation or small group would like to be a part of the Coffee Project. They will give you a form to fill out to join the coffee project. If there is no Ten Thousand Villages store near you, order in bulk from Equal Exchange at wholesale prices.

Ask your local grocery store manager to sell fairly traded coffee and encourage your neighbors and friends to purchase it. Give fairly traded coffee, teas, cocoa and chocolates as gifts this holiday season. Equal Exchange will help design fund-raising projects for youth groups. Contact them at interfaith@equalexchange.com or (781) 830-0303 ext. 228.

Urge Procter & Gamble to accept Equal Exchange's challenge to match the small Massachusetts cooperative (Equal Exchange) pound for pound in Fair Trade coffee sales in 2004. Call them toll free 800-937-9745 or FAX through the Global Exchange website: file:///P:/Website_Kidron/greatlakes/programs/peace_justice_newsletter/03/www.globalexchange.org/campaigns/fairtrade/coffee/folgersFax.html. If Procter and Gamble does this, then Equal Exchange will donate $25,000 to one of their small farmer cooperative trading partners in Latin America.

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Palestine/Israel relationship

Palestine/Israel relationship- Life for the Palestinian people continues to worsen long after some had thought the situation could not become worse. This is happening because the Israeli government has not yet achieved it’s goal of controlling the land and the Palestinian people. The outcome the Israeli government appears to seek is separation of the Palestinian people from their land. This is being done with no regard for the welfare and future of these people or international laws or warnings from the international community and using the crude tools of the Wall, roadblocks and control of permits.

Report from Alain Epp Weaver, MCC country representative in the West Bank, Update on October 30, 2003

Expulsion and Destruction- What many had feared would happen when Israel began constructing its "security fence" (more accurately, its "segregation" / "apartheid" barrier) in the West Bank has started to happen: Palestinians trapped between the barrier and the "Green Line" separating Israel and the West Bank are having their presence on their land delegitimized by the Israeli military authorities. Major General Moshe Kaplinski this month issued a military order declaring the areas between the barrier and the Green Line to be closed military areas. Closed, to Palestinians: Israeli Jews are still allowed to move freely in these areas. Those who happen to live in these areas, however, will have to obtain permits simply to maintain the right to live in their homes and on their land. If precedents in Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem hold true, residents of affected villages will find these permits revoked for reasons such as going to a nearby West Bank village to study, and will discover that they cannot marry someone without such a permit and bring him/her to live with them. Ran HaCohen, an Israeli commentator, describes this new reality thus: "So if your mother happened to be Jewish, and you live in Montreal, in Mexico City or in Johannesburg, you need no permit to go to the small West Bank village of Salim. But if you are Palestinian, even if you and your family have been in Salim for centuries, you cannot stay there without a permit from Major General Kaplinski 'or someone acting on his behalf', as the order goes."

Despite objections from the U.S. administration, and despite an economic crisis the Israeli government's building of the walls and fences continues unabated. For the village of Akaba in the northern West Bank, this means that 12 out of 18 homes, the village mosque and kindergarten, will be demolished to make the barrier. Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz claims that the barrier does not disrupt the "normal fabric of life" for Palestinians, but USAID the United Nations, the European Union, and anyone who visits a village like Jayyous and speaks with farmers as they are denied access to their lands, can attest to the falsity of this claim.

Report and background of the Olive Harvest Coalition joint Palestinian/Israeli effort at Hirbat Jabara by Adam Keller

"Between a rock and a hard place"- The landscape seemed highly picturesque: the olive trees dotting the rolling hills, the strewn rocks, the placidly grazing donkey. Such a sharp contrast with the congested superhighways and high-rise office towers of metropolitan Tel-Aviv, a short drive away - a short drive, that is, to those privileged to pass the various barriers and roadblocks. But we had not come as tourists, and the apparently tranquil countryside was the inside of a besieged enclave, around which a noose is being drawn ever tighter.

It was to help these besieged people that a mobilization effort had been mounted in the past week by the Olive Harvest Coalition. Already before arriving at our destination on this Saturday, Oct. 25, we had a good close look at The Fence - a line drawn across the landscape in the past year, cutting arbitrarily across the fields and the lives of those who live hereabouts. For some time our cavalcade - seven buses and some private cars - moved parallel to this implacable barrier, then we moved back from it, along ever-worsening roads and tracks.

Soon came the moment to alight and divide into groups of about twenty, each guided by Palestinian farmers. Then quite a long way by foot, partly along goat tracks full of thorns and brambles, under a blazing sun which would have better fitted a day in mid-August rather then late October. Finally we arrived, panting. Mufid, our guide, pointed to the trees to the left: "These are ours, my father planted many of them". Then to the buildings on the next hill: "That is the settlement of Sal'it. The army is always getting nervous when we try to come here. With you, it should be more easy."

But now, even the settlement takes second place in his worries in comparison to The Fence. "My village, Ras, is on the other side, and most of our fields and olives were left on this side. We have to ask for permits to cross the gate. I got a one-month permit. My wife, who did a large part of the harvest last year and in all the years before, did not get one. Why? The soldiers just told me "That's the way it is". Half of our village got no permit."

We do our best to take the place of the villagers who were banned from coming here. Olive picking is a companionable work. The group spread around a tree and went through the branches one by one, hunting for the little blue-black olives. "We should be like locusts, leaving not a single olive unpicked. The harvest was not particularly good this year, we must make the best of what there is there" admonishes Ehud, the coordinator of our group.

MCC Project Updates and Resources

*Through the Culture and Free Thought Association in the Gaza Strip, MCC will be providing blankets and basic foodstuffs to 200 families in Rafah who lost their homes this month. MCC would welcome donations for the emergency response in Rafah. The total cost of the response is $10,680. This will cover 2 blankets and food packets (for two weeks) for 200 families. The designation could be: Palestine-Rafah response.

*MCC has just agreed to support an innovative new project initiated by MCC partner Zochrot, an Israeli organization dedicated to exploring how justice for Palestinian refugees is an integral part of durable peace and reconciliation in Palestine/Israel. Zochrot will hold a series of meetings between internally displaced Palestinians living inside Israel (people who lost their lands in 1948 but who, because they live inside Israel, are not considered official refugees) and Israeli Jews from communities now using those lands; the meetings and workshops will provide places where internally displaced Palestinians can tell the history of their villages and the circumstances under which they were expelled. The meetings will then address sensitive issues such as the role of property restitution in sustainable peacebuilding. Eytan Bronstein, director of Zochrot and youth dialogue coordinator at the School for Peace at Neve Shalom/Wahat el-Salam, anticipates that the meetings will be tense, but strongly believes that any lasting peace and reconciliation between Palestinians and Israeli Jews cannot shy away from such difficult subjects. This project is covered by funds from the Canadian government, so it isn't a project for which funds should be solicited. However, MCC did support similar commemorative/educational visits to destroyed Palestinian villages by Israeli Jewish groups with Zochrot earlier this fiscal year--the budget on that was US$5000. If people would wish to donate to that, designate it as: Palestine-Zochrot

Books: Mourid Barghouti, I Saw Ramallah (New York: Anchor Books, 2003). A moving account of exile and tentative return by a Palestinian poet from the West Bank who lived in forced exile from 1967 to 1995.

Ronit Chacham, ed. Breaking Ranks: Refusing to Serve in the West Bank and Gaza Strip (New York: The Other Press, 2003). Chacham offers portraits of and interviews with several Israeli soldiers who refuse to serve in the occupied territories.

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Remembering the words of Jesus to his followers as recorded by Matthew. ‘Go.....And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.’ May you know peace within and without.

Anita Barahona Oliver and Lois Hess Nafziger
Peace & Justice Educator/Advoctaes for MCC Great Lakes

© 2003 Mennonite Central Committee
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