'A marketing genius'

Starbucks conveys a different image on the white foil bags of Ethiopia Sidamo whole bean coffee it sells for $10.45 a pound. "Good coffee, doing good," says lettering on the side.

"We believe there's a connection between the farmers who grow our coffees, us and you. That's why we work together with coffee-growing communities -- paying prices that help farmers support their families ... and funding projects like building a bridge in Ethiopia's Sidamo region to help farmers get to market safely. ... By drinking this coffee, you're helping to make a difference."

And while the Sidamo footbridge does make travel safer, it is but a simple yellow-brown concrete slab, 10 paces long.

Dean Cycon, founder of Dean's Beans, an organic coffee company in Massachusetts, calls Starbucks "a marketing genius."

"They put out cleverly crafted material that makes the consumer feel they are doing everything possible," Cycon said. "But there is no institutional commitment. They do it to capture a market and shut up the activists."

Starbucks officials insist such critics have it wrong. As proof, they point to Latin America, the source of the bulk of the company's beans.

"You go to Nariño, Colombia. We built 1,800 (coffee) washing stations and sanitation facilities and homes," said Dub Hay, Starbucks senior vice president for global coffee procurement. "It's literally changed the face of that whole area."

"The same is true throughout Latin America," Hay added. "They call it the Starbucks effect."

Starbucks' dealings in Latin America have drawn some fire. Near the El Triunfo Biosphere Reserve in Chiapas, Mexico, for instance, farmers cut off relations about three years ago over a dispute about selling to an exporter instead of directly to Starbucks. The new arrangement, farmers said, would drain profits from peasant growers.

Starbucks, the farmers charged in a memo to coffee buyers, was supporting "a pseudo-fair trade system, adapted to their own neo-liberal interests, to dismantle structures and advances that we have made."

In an e-mailed response to The Bee, Starbucks vice president for global communications, Frank Kern, wrote that the Chiapas farmers were ultimately "given the opportunity to ship directly to us as they requested, but they were unable to manage it."

Sharper focus on Africa

In Ethiopia, Starbucks says, it spent $25,000 on three footbridges in 2004. The company estimates the structures are used by 70,000 farmers and family members -- about 1 percent of those who depend upon coffee for income. Some Ethiopian coffee leaders say there is a better way to help.

"If we are paid a (coffee) price which is decent, the people can make the bridge on their own," said Tadesse Meskela, general manager of the Oromia Coffee Farmers' Cooperative Union of 100,000 farmers, which has sold to Starbucks. "We don't have to be always beggars."

Starbucks won't disclose what it pays for Ethiopian coffee. Instead, it lumps its purchases together into a global average, which last year was $1.42 a pound, 16 cents more than the Fair Trade minimum. Much of that money, though, never makes it into the pockets of farmers but instead is siphoned off by buyers, processors and other middlemen.

Starbucks executives say they want to shrink that supply chain. "You end up at least five levels removed from the farmer and that's where the money goes," said Hay. "And that's a shame." Hay said that as the company buys more coffee from Africa -- it plans to double its purchases there to 36 million pounds by 2009 -- the commerce will spur more progress.

"That's our goal," Hay said. "Africa is 6 percent of our purchases. ... Seventy percent is from Latin America. So that's where our money has gone."

Making an impact in Ethiopia is undeniably a challenge. Good roads, electricity, potable water don't exist in many places. The climate is often hostile. There are ethnic conflicts, border disputes and rebel movements, and a sea of young faces that gather every time a car stops.

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