Part I Coffee: Product of Colombia

As Timmerman states his travels and the farmers and communities he met, it quickly becomes clear that the things we eat, enjoy and take for granted are actually grown and harvested by people who struggle to put food on their dinner tables. Families are heartbroken because they have to raise a family to work for a company that won’t even help them put dinner on the table. Timmerman explains that a farmer doesn't have to win a Cup of Excellence to have his life impacted by coffee. What can we do? Buying Fair Trade is all consumers, which is the drinkers of coffee, can do about this problem. Not buying or consuming in the product would conflict the workers/farmers lives worse than the way they are getting treated now. A pay cut for them is a huge problem that would mean they couldn’t support their families and put food on the table when needed. Timmerman states in the chapter two that the farmers only get 93 cents for a ten dollar bag of coffee. Which means a pay cut would just get them what they needed and not anything else, maybe not even what they needed. Where Am I Eating, investigates the delicious, taken for granted, food we eat every day. Unnecessary working conditions for the growers, minimum wages and enforcing many more rules like growing and picking more beans in a shorter amount of time. This is where Fair Trade can make a huge amount of difference. Fair Trade guarantees farmers fair wages, for dinner to be on the tables, good working conditions and development rules so they can empower themselves and their communities and see sustainable changes for future generations. Fair Trade is better for the farmers and companies to look on because there is an amount of rules that have to be followed. Fair Trade is something new for the countries like Columbia that grows or raises something they sell to another country. It enforces rules that are luxurious to these kinds of countries. They believe that this is a start for future generations to be respected and also for the future generations to be earning more and supporting more of the family’s needs, like education. Regular trade is something that everyone around the world does it has been in generations and generations of people. Unlike Fair Trade Regular Trade does not guarantee anyone beneficial wages or respectful working conditions. Therefore, some company’s do not honor the 3^rd world Countries, which will work for a dime a day with respectable working conditions, enough to take care and treat the workers with respect. All the companies are worried about, how much they will be making off of a single cup of coffee, and how much of that will be sent to the growers.  So the next time you reach for that seven - eight dollar cup of coffee, take a second to think about who grew and farmed the coffee beans that made that delicious taste in your mouth and ask yourself: Where am I eating?