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.”31 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.
“Coffee has always been a very unforgiving business,” Rivera explained to a reporter. For much of his life, he lugged hundred-pound burlap sacks of green coffee beans down a winding dirt road to the market. That’s where he sold his crop, usually to a middleman operating as an intermediary for the company owned by the family of that Penn student I talked with or one of the other big private interests that processed and exported Nicaraguan coffee. Often, at this point, Rivera got doubly cheated. The buyer might swindle him on the weight and then pay him half the price he would get for the coffee later in the day or the day after. Moreover, nothing came back to the community. Only in the best years—with big yields, decent prices, and a break or two at the market— would Rivera earn enough to cover what it cost to grow the crop. No matter what, he never had anything extra. His kids, as a result, left school early to work in the fields.
In 1996, after the Sandinista revolution had led to some tentative steps toward land distribution, Rivera joined PROCENCAFE, a large network of small farmers in his region of the country, which sold fair-trade-certified coffee to U.S. and European roasters. Almost immediately, Rivera’s life improved. The co-op freed him from preying middle-men, gave him access to affordable credit, provided him with a voice in community affairs, and consistently sold his coffee for a decent price. With the added funds, Rivera bought a mule to get his coffee down the steep dirt road leading to town, patched up his roof, and purchased shoes and clothes for his children. The younger ones, then, started to attend school regularly.32
With its hardscrabble beginning and happy ending, Rivera’s tale of success and good fortune sounded like one of Starbucks’ farmers’ stories. The company, it turns out, did try to sell his story. When I was in Nicaragua, I heard from three different sources that Starbucks used a picture of Rivera in its promotional literature. But I couldn’t find that image for years. Finally, I saw Rivera’s face at a Starbucks in Norwich, England, in March 2009. The handsome farmer, his wife, and six children stared back at me from inside of one of those brochures Starbucks lines up behind its milk bar. The coffee company titled the Rivera pamphlet,
copyrighted in 2005, “Starbucks and Fair Trade: Supporting a Better Life for Coffee Farmers.” Turns out, though, according to my Nicaraguan sources, Starbucks never bought more than a minuscule amount of beans, if it bought any at all, from Rivera.
Santiago Dolmus, the communications officer for CEOCAFEN, a Matagalpa-based coffee co-op, was one of the people who told me about Rivera and Starbucks. “For years,” he said, “Starbucks has come to the co-ops and said, ‘You have coffee; we want to buy it.’ But they never do it . . . it is just a show.”
“So,” I asked, “who are they getting their coffee from?”
Serious and stern-faced to that point, Dolmus smiled, as if to say, Don’t you know? I could guess, but I wanted him to make it clear.
“They aren’t buying from the co-ops,” he repeated. “They go through large intermediaries and the big farms and the medium farms.”
Mario Mejia runs Esperanza Coffee, a family-owned dry mill and export house. Most of the beans that come through his place these days go to Starbucks. He told me the same basic story as Dolmus; he just added some numbers. According to his estimate, about 6 percent of what Starbucks buys in Nicaragua comes from small holders; the rest it gets through middlemen or directly from the owners of large and medium-sized estates, some with ties going back to the anti-Sandinista Somoza regime.
• • •
Joaquin Solorzano plopped a bulging cardboard box down on the patio table behind the family house on San Luis Finca. “There it is,” he said, in perfect English. (He learned the language while exiled in Miami during the early years of the Sandinista revolt.) The box, he explained, contained the papers, reports, and forms he had to submit to get certified under CAFE Practices.
Pointing again to the box, Solorzano likened Starbucks to a “punishing teacher.” If you didn’t do what he said, you got in trouble. And like a student in a strict teacher’s class, you acted out of fear, not for any other reason. There was little back-and-forth in these kinds of classrooms. The teachers assumed that they knew everything. Or maybe it was that they just did what they wanted. Starbucks, he continued, issued only one-year contracts, making it hard for growers to plan and even harder to get loans at reasonable rates. But no one complained, Solorzano noted, because no one wanted to lose the business. Same with CAFE Practices. Starbucks, for example, gave growers points for growing more environmentally friendly shade coffee and then boasted about this later in the press. Farmers went along because they wanted the business, not because they bought into the program or didn’t already know about the benefits of protecting their coffee plants with canopies of leaves. They just wanted the points on the CAFE Practices test and didn’t care if Starbucks claimed credit for introducing these techniques to the region in the press back in the States.33
Solorzano speaks two languages and attended college in the United States for a couple of semesters, but still it took him almost a year to fill out all the documents and forms for the CAFE Practices application. In order to comply with the program, he put up signs on his farm, saying that no one under fourteen could work there and that the workday would begin at 6 A.M. and end at 2 P.M. He cut back on his use of chemical fertilizers (resulting in lower yields) and took out a rather expensive loan to build a school for his workers (although he wasn’t sure he would be able to get a government-approved teacher, typically a single woman, to live on the farm alone). Starbucks didn’t pay for anything. All told, Solorzano spent more than three thousand dollars—more than double the national average family wage and surely four or five times what most coffee workers earned each year—to make these environmental and social changes. He had to pay another fifteen hundred dollars plus travel and lodging expenses to get a Starbucks-certified inspector to come to his farm and fill out his CAFE Practices scorecard. This he had to do every year. In 2006, by the way, the teacher gave his farm a 76, a solid C.
“Was it worth it?” I asked. Solorzano thought for a moment and answered like a businessman. He didn’t say anything about the environment or about social responsibility, although these things came up in our conversation later when he talked about his commitment to his workers (“They are like family,” he proclaimed) and the environment (he vowed to make sure that he did nothing to contaminate the water supply that ran through his land to the city below). “Starbucks,” he explained, “pays pretty well and buys up all the coffee for a decent price.” This last point was the key. By contrast, “you can make your farm organic, and that pays more [per pound] than Starbucks, but rarely can you sell all the coffee you grow as organic.” The same thing with fair trade, he noted.
While we walked around the farm, he showed me where most of his workers lived—the people who picked the beans on his estate and most other medium-sized and large farms in Nicaragua selling to Starbucks. Essentially migrant workers, the laborers and their families spend part of the year on the coffee farm and then return to their towns, villages, and other dots on the map for the rest of the year. They get paid only for the days they actually work, guaranteeing that just about everyone will remain in poverty.
“Where do they live?” I asked.
He pointed toward a long, skinny row of seven-foot-tall cinder blocks with eight, maybe ten, doors and seemingly no electricity or plumbing. At first, I thought they were the outhouses, but Solorzano had already showed me where the toilets were located. On this C-grade CAFE Practices farm, working people lived in what almost any Starbucks customer in the United States would call hovels—that is the only word to describe them. Three, four, and five people crammed themselves into these unlit rooms smaller than a Starbucks bathroom in Manhattan.
I knew from everything I had read that social conditions were a big part of CAFE Practices, so I asked Solorzano how things had changed for his workers since he started selling coffee to Starbucks. He pointed to the finished, but unopened, school.
What about wages? He shook his head from side to side. He told me that the government regulated them at about two dollars per day. (And again the workers don’t get paid when they don’t work, when it rains, or for the months and months between coffee harvests.) Anything else? He pointed to another small building under construction on his estate.
“What’s that?”
“A canteen,” he said.
“CAFE Practices?” I asked.
“Oh, no,” Solorzano answered. He built the kitchen because he needed to compete with other farmers to get good workers. The owners of area coffee estates, he explained, faced a shortage of experienced coffee hands. He hoped that the school would help out on that front as well. Government regulations and the lack of available labor, he argued, drove most of the far-reaching changes that businessmen were putting into place in his region of the country. Growers upgraded their estates to attract more workers. In other words, the labor market and to a lesser extent state action, not Starbucks, improved workers’ lives. But the CAFE Practices materials don’t say much about these more public dynamics.
Like Santiago Dolmus of CEOCAFEN, Solorzano also made it clear that CAFE Practices isn’t for everyone. “It’s not for the little guys,” he declared. They just can’t afford it—can’t afford the results of lower yields because of less fertilizer, paying for auditors, or building schools. They can’t figure it out, either, he said, pointing again to the box of papers on the table.
Starbucks doesn’t market Joaquin Solorzano’s CAFE Practices story. His smooth, uncreased face, pressed khaki pants, and neat polo shirt aren’t featured in any company pictures or brochures or corpumentaries. It doesn’t package his workers’ stories, either. In Starbucks’ version of globalization, the company makes the world better for small farmers like Santiago Rivera (even though it won’t buy his beans). When Starbucks first got strong-armed by Global Exchange into purchasing fair-trade coffee, a company official told a reporter, “Fair trade gets the benefit back to the family farmer. It is consistent with our values.”34 Consumers, then, could feel better because they helped a decent, hard-working, and h
andsome man, who looks like Rivera, provide a better life for himself and his family.
In actuality, however, on the ground our tall cup of coffee—when it comes from Nicaragua or Rwanda or most other places—usually doesn’t come from a small holder. Instead, it might be picked by a migrant farmer and his family members for an already comfortable, well-off, perhaps politically powerful family of growers—the same kind of people who have long benefited from access to land, cheap labor, and affordable credit in the global economy. In the end, Starbucks erases its chief suppliers, as well as the lion’s share of its workforce, from its global narratives. Neither group makes for good copy, and neither group suggests much has changed in the global order—just more of the same.
STARBUCKS, THE TYPICAL: THE CASE OF ETHIOPIA
What Starbucks does—how it acts and what it says—in Rwanda and Nicaragua reveals an essential truth about the company. Sure, it isn’t some sort of monster out there trying to crush the little guy. Yet it isn’t out to help him, either—at least that’s not the first order of business. Starbucks sells itself as a global good guy, and this, it hopes, will distinguish it from other companies and at the same time allow its customers to distinguish themselves from others. But in the end, despite all the films, press releases, and posters about helping farmers (and workers and the planet), Starbucks is no better and no worse than other companies. Starbucks is typical, even ordinary. The problem is that Starbucks isn’t a business built on selling the ordinary. At the premium end of the market, customers want not just better products but better, more compelling and valuable stories. While I learned about Starbucks’ ordinariness reading about Rwanda and going to Nicaragua, others learned this truth from Ethiopia.
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