Cup that cheers the soul

Zigana restaurant and cafe owner Ramazan Semiz is well aware of what a fair trade deal means for impoverished farmers. Picture / Dean Purcell

Alessandro Orifici admits he's unorthodox. "You have to be quite courageous to come up with a blend and shock the market." The Sicilian-born barista is talking about his Paradiso coffee - double-roasted, strong, and fulminating with an earthy robusta heart.

"Up until a couple of years ago, every roaster in New Zealand was saying that to use robusta is to cheat. They would say: 'How can you be using this cheap coffee?' "

At Orifici's Santini cafe on Devonport wharf the smell of roasting coffee beans wafts among commuters lining up for their first-of-the-day caffeine hit. They seem unconcerned that this gorgeous aroma is laced with argument about the merits of lowly robusta mixed with noble arabica beans, about where the beans are grown and whether or not the farmers are getting fairly paid.

The logic goes like this. When you buy and drink coffee you are drinking "a global society" - Kenyan, Columbian, Papua New Guinean, Sumatran, Timorese, and so on.

Peer a little deeper into your cup and you may find you're also drinking exploitation - especially of poor farmers in places such as Guatemala, Nicaragua, Ethiopia and elsewhere.

It's a modern condition that's hard to avoid - being an active participant in a culture that operates globally in ways that you would find offensive if it were happening locally.

At Orifici's, and at similar cafes throughout New Zealand, most of us are happy to sit back and, well ... smell the coffee. But change is in the air. Across the road is Chiasso - a roastery that's been operating for eight years and supplies about 50 cafes.

Behind the counter a blackboard proclaims: "Fair Trade" coffee - Chiasso's Pascolo blend and a single-origin Yirgacheffe coffee from Ethiopia.

Owner Brendan McKellar says it's a response to consumer demand. "People are coming in to ask for Fairtrade coffee. They want it for that reason and even if they have a marginal preference for the taste of one of our other blends, they will buy the fair trade coffee." The demand doesn't stop there. A block away from Chiasso, in Devonport's Victoria Rd, is the Zigana restaurant and cafe where owner Ramazan Semiz is busy packing his freshly roasted beans and ground coffee into 200g bags bearing the Fairtrade logo which states: "Guarantees a better deal for Third World Producers". Zigana's blends sell in New World and Pak'n Save supermarkets for $6.99.

"My background is a farmer," says Semiz, who comes from Turkey. "Lots of farmers do not have the opportunity to sell their products, so I thought I could be one of the cogs to contribute towards these farmers - then at least I do my part. We all will like to do good things in our lifetime."

Buying coffee on moral grounds - excuse the pun - is something increasing numbers of consumers are finding suits their taste. In 2002, Trade Aid, New Zealand's main importer of Fairtrade coffee, brought in a meagre 8 tonnes of green beans. This year it will import 320 tonnes - a small but significant statistic in the context of about 5000 tonnes of arabica beans imported each year for roasting.

New Zealand has been relatively slow to catch the Fairtrade wave, which includes tea, cocoa, sugar, honey, bananas, nuts, seeds and fresh vegetables. In 2003 there were only $2000 worth of Fairtrade-label sales in New Zealand. By last year that surged to $1.5 million, mainly in coffee sales. About 20 licensees, including Zigana, pay the Fair Trade Association of Australia and New Zealand 2 per cent of the wholesale value of their sales to use the label.

"The label on the product is the guarantee to the consumer that that product has come through a Fairtrade supply chain," says Fair Trade Association New Zealand manager Steve Knapp.

At the grower end of the chain, companies such as Trade Aid negotiate directly with co-operatives of farmers and promise a long-term minimum price and pre-financing. Often they offer additional premiums above the market price, designed to support community projects. Ethiopian Yirgacheffe coffee, for example, has a market price today of US$1.24 ($1.98) a pound. Trade Aid pays US$1.55 ($2.48).

Does it work? "When you're in Ethiopia and talking to Yirgacheffe farmers who have, with their premium, been able to construct a series of classrooms for their school for their children - well they didn't have that before," says Trade Aid coffee manager Justin Purser.

He says the intervention is necessary because small-scale farmers, locked into a life of poverty, are in a vulnerable bargaining position when they sell their crop to intermediaries.

Forced to sell at below-market prices, farmers frequently have to borrow from banks or other moneylenders, often at exorbitant rates, using their next harvest as security.

But exploitation-free beans alone do not a great cup of coffee make.

Essential to the global spread of coffee culture is the espresso machine. Relatively scarce in New Zealand as recently as 15 years ago, the device perfected by Achilles Gaggia in Italy in 1946 has totally colonised cafes, not just here but throughout the world.

Bean meets machine. Or, more precisely, 7gm to 9gm of ground beans in a skilled barista's hands, under 9-bar pressure at between 88C and 94C will extract in 20 to 25 seconds the perfect cup with the beloved crema coffee that aficionados live for.

There's also been an influx of coffee-roasting machines - so much so that there about 120 roasters scattered across the country and it's not unusual to find two or three in a suburb such as Devonport, within walking distance of each other.

Then there are the baristas. As Santini's Orifici explains, the blend, the grinder and espresso machine account for 60 per cent of what makes a good cup of coffee. But it is the barista's art - "like the conductor in the orchestra, the co-ordinator" - that adds the remaining 40 per cent.

We have the technology. But the real mark of a globalised coffee culture is not how the beans, the machines and the makers are the same, but how they combine to make something different - a distinctly local flavour. Some put that down to the blends - predominantly a Papua New Guinean, Kenyan and Columbian mix. Others say it's the high-quality milk, with some going as far as to claim New Zealand invented the flat white.

The question here is: has Fairtrade become an issue because the coffee is so good? When you're enjoying something this much - as New Zealanders obviously are - it's unsettling, not to mention distasteful, to think it's an enjoyment born out of poverty.

In the social foment of the coffeehouse, it's also hardly surprising that this drug that sharpens the mind has itself become politicised. Not everyone agrees. A father of New Zealand coffee culture, who talks to the Weekend Herald as long as we don't mention his name, remains unconvinced about the Fairtrade phenomenon.

"I question whether the right people are getting the money. The Fairtrade organisations rake off a commission to organise the operation. I don't believe it's the way to go because it's supply and demand which determines the price of any product."

He disagrees that most coffee is exploitation coffee, pointing out that it's a commodity well traded on world exchanges with scope for those who wish to fix prices by paper contracts to cover their production requirements.

"People are thinking [with Fairtrade] they are doing a really wonderful thing, but I just wonder how wonderful it is. It's another way of selling by tugging on people's heart-strings."

Coffee to wash away liberal guilt. This coffee pioneer accepts that the poor farmer needs more than subsistence, and believes direct relationships between buyers and growers, and being prepared to pay a premium, are essential to ensure good-quality beans. But he says that if there is a world oversupply of coffee, the appropriate reaction for the farmer is to be growing other things and cut back on coffee production. "The boom-bust thing has been in coffee for hundreds of years. You can't beat supply and demand."

Robusta beans enter the debate mainly because they're not on Trade Aid's Fairtrade buying books. Depending on who you talk to, people either swear by robusta or describe it as the worst thing in their lives that's ever happened to a cup of coffee.

The coffee-culture pioneer is disdainful. "The Italians must have robusta, but we are doing very well without it." The scorn stems from the fact that, unlike arabica beans which grow only at high altitudes, robusta grows anywhere. It's also cheaper, and is the bean most used in instant coffee.

But for roasters like Chiasso, who have unashamedly been using small percentages of robusta in some of their blends for eight years, the benefits are plain - more caffeine, better crema and fuller body.

And the high-quality robusta beans from Java that Chiasso's McKellar uses are just as expensive as some arabica. He'd very much like Trade Aid to source some Fairtrade robusta.

There is a similar argument from Orifici who, like McKellar, buys some Fairtrade-sourced coffee but hasn't taken the step of getting licensed to use the Fairtrade logo. Orifici also buys coffee that's Rainforest Alliance certified - a group with similar goals to Fairtrade but with an emphasis on environmental concerns. He's happy to support both as long as he gets the quality beans he needs.

"I'd love to calm my conscience and say, 'Yes I'm a Fairtrade coffee dealer', but I also have a responsibility to my customers and they say they want this robusta blend. If I can't create this blend with Fairtrade, I'm not buying Fairtrade - so it's a Catch-22 situation. I realise the responsibility from the human point of view, but I also see the commercial reality."

Whether Trade Aid will adapt to the supply and demand needs of cafes like Santini and Chiasso remains to be seen.

But with 550 certified producer organisations in 51 countries representing one million producers and estimated to benefit five million people, Fairtrade is booming. World Fairtrade retail sales are estimated at $1.6 billion.

Meanwhile at Zigana, Semiz - who buys all his coffee beans from Fairtrade - is committed to the long haul: "To satisfy myself. I'm not in a hurry. Maybe it's not a business mind, but it is good for myself, my soul, my way of thinking."