Investigative Report: Promises and poverty

GEMADRO, Ethiopia -- Tucked inside a fancy black box, the $26-a-pound Starbucks Black Apron Exclusives coffee promised to be more than just another bag of beans.

Not only was the premium coffee from a remote plantation in Ethiopia "rare, exotic, cherished," according to Starbucks advertising, it was grown in ways that were good for the environment -- and for local people, too.

Companies routinely boast about what they're doing for the planet, in part because guilt-ridden consumers expect as much -- and are willing to pay extra for it. But, in this case, Starbucks' eco-friendly sales pitch does not begin to reflect the complex story of coffee in East Africa.

Inside the front flap of Starbucks' box are African arabica beans grown on a plantation in a threatened mountain rain forest. Behind the lofty phrases on the back label are coffee workers who make less than a dollar a day and a dispute between plantation officials and neighboring tribal people, who accuse the plantation of using their ancestral land and jeopardizing their way of life.

"We used to hunt and fish in there, and also we used to have honeybee hives in trees," one tribal member, Mikael Yatola, said through a translator. "But now we can't do that. ... When we were told to remove our beehives from there, we felt deep sorrow, deep sadness."

25 new U.S. stores per week

Few companies have so dramatically conquered the American retail landscape as Starbucks. Last year, the $7.8 billion company opened an average of 25 new stores a week in the United States alone. Nowhere is Starbucks a more common sight than in environmentally conscious California, which has 2,350 outlets, more than New York, Massachusetts, Florida, Oregon and Washington -- Starbucks' home state -- combined.

No coffee company claims to do more for the environment and Third World farmers than Starbucks either. In full-page ads in the New York Times, in brochures and on its Web page, Starbucks says that it pays premium prices for premium beans, protects tropical forests and enhances the lives of farmers by building schools, clinics and other projects.

In places, Starbucks delivers on those promises, certainly more so than other multinational coffee companies. In parts of Latin America, for instance, its work has helped improve water quality, educate children and protect biodiversity.

Inside many Starbucks outlets across America, the African décor is hard to miss. There are photographs and watercolors of quaint coffee-growing scenes from Ethiopia to Tanzania to Zimbabwe. Yet such images clash with the reality of African life.

They don't show the industrial arm of coffee -- the large farms and estates that encroach on wild forest regions. They don't reveal that even in the best of times in Ethiopia, the birthplace of wild coffee and the source of some of Starbucks' priciest offerings, there is barely enough for the peasant coffee farmers who still grow most of the nation's beans.

Even where Starbucks has built its bricks-and-mortar projects in Ethiopia, poverty remains a cornerstone of life, visible in the soot-stained cooking pots, spindly legs and ragged T-shirts, in the mad scramble of children for a visitor's cookie or empty water bottle.

"We plant coffee, harvest coffee but we never get anything out of it," said Muel Alema, a rail-thin coffee farmer who lives near a Starbucks-funded footbridge spanning a narrow chasm in Ethiopia's famous Sidamo coffee-growing region.

Alema's tattered shirt looked years old. So did his mud-splattered thongs. The red coffee berries he sold to a local buyer last fall were mixed with mountains of others, stripped of their pulp and sold as beans to distant companies -- like other farmers, he did not know which ones -- that made millions selling Sidamo coffee. Only $220 dribbled back to him.

This February, after Alema paid workers to pick the beans and bought grain for his family, just $110 remained -- not enough, he said, to feed his wife and three children, to buy them clothes until the crop ripens again.

About the writer:

• The Bee's Tom Knudson can be reached at (530) 582-5336 or tknudson@sacbee.com.