Taking the GE Food Fight Directly to the Marketplace

by Ronnie Cummins, Organic Consumers Association

In the wake of the StarLink scandal, in which over 300 consumer products were contaminated with GE corn deemed "not fit for human consumption," now is the time for U.S. consumers and food activists to go on the offensive.

The Organic Consumers Association and five of our closest allies (Friends of the Earth, Rights Action Canada, Center for Food Safety, Pesticide Action Network, and Sustain) have decided to target Starbucks, the largest gourmet coffee shop chain in the world, as our first major North American corporate target.

Starbucks has over 2,500 coffee shops in the U.S. and Canada (3,300 worldwide) and sells its bottled Frappuccino coffee beverages and ice cream to several thousand additional retailers and college campuses.

Twenty percent of all coffee shops in the USA are now owned by Starbucks. Starbucks has partnerships with Pepsi-Cola, Marriott, Kraft/Phillip Morris, and the Albertson's supermarket chain.

In addition, Starbucks now has outlets in 18 nations, making them one of the fastest-growing food and beverage companies in the world.

Why Target Starbucks on GE Food?

Despite rising consumer concerns, Starbucks stubbornly refuses to guarantee that the milk, beverages, chocolate, ice cream, and baked goods they are serving or selling are free of recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone (rBGH) and other genetically engineered ingredients (including soy derivatives and corn sweeteners).

The bottom line is that Starbucks needs to get rid of all GE food ingredients and label its packaged or bottled products as being GE-free.

Several thousand Starbucks outlets are still using milk coming from dairies that allow cows to be injected with Monsanto's controversial Bovine Growth Hormone, a hormone often associated with higher risks for cancer in humans. rBGH is a powerful drug, which cruelly damages the health of dairy cows, forcing them to give more milk.

Milk from rBGH injected cows is also likely to contain more pus, antibiotic residues, and bacteria.

Monsanto's rBGH is banned in every industrialized country in the world except for the United States and Mexico.

Starbucks is one of the largest buyers of rBGH-tainted milk in the world.

Although biotechnology corporations are currently field-testing genetically engineered (decaffeinated) coffee beans, Starbucks has not taken a public stand on whether or not it intends to purchase these genetically engineered coffee beans in the future.

Linking Environmental and Social Justice Issues

Although Starbucks has recently bowed to consumer pressure and begun selling certified Fair Trade, shade-grown (organic or transition to organic) coffee beans in bulk, they are refusing to brew and seriously promote Fair Trade coffee, unlike a number of other gourmet coffee shops and companies.

Only shade-grown or organic coffee, which avoids the use of the use of toxic pesticides and chemical fertilizers, protects the environment and preserves the forest canopy and the priceless biodiversity of plants and animals (including migratory songbirds).

All coffee certified as Fair Trade or organic is shade-grown, as opposed to corporate plantation coffee, which is grown in the direct sunlight, utilizing pesticides and chemical fertilizers, typically on large plantations where the surrounding forest cover has been completely chopped down.

Wages paid to impoverished farm workers on the typical sun-grown coffee plantations supplying Starbucks and other large coffee buyers average approximately $600 per year, less than the annual cost of a daily Starbucks latte in the U.S., Canada, Japan, or Europe.

Coffee is the largest agricultural export commodity on the world market, with 18 billion dollars in annual sales.

The U.S. coffee import market, the largest in the world, totals almost four billion dollars. Coffee is a widely cultivated crop that can readily be converted to or maintained as 100% shade-grown and organic.

It is the most important export of dozens of developing nations, including Mexico and the nations of Central America.

There are 25 million, mainly small, coffee farmers left in the world, most of whom are growing coffee in a sustainable and organic (shade-grown as opposed to sun grown and chemical-intensive) manner.

Many of these indigenous and small farmers, who inhabit the most biologically diverse and fragile areas of the world (the mountains and rainforests of Chiapas, Oaxaca, and Guatemala for example), are trying to make a living in the face of intense economic exploitation, racial discrimination, and government repression.

Only 550,000 or 2% of the world's coffee growers now benefit from being part of the Fair Trade movement.

We need to increase this percentage, as quickly as possible, or else indigenous and rural communities across the global South and tropical biodiversity will perish.

Analysts estimate that as many as 50% of shade-grown coffee producers in countries like Mexico will abandon production over the next few years unless market demand for Fair Trade coffee increases dramatically.

Currently four food giants basically control the world's coffee supply: Procter and Gamble (Folgers); Kraft/Phillip Morris (Maxwell House); Sarah Lee (European brands), and Nestle (Hills Brothers).

Buyers for these conglomerates have recently been paying small farmers as little as 30 cents a pound for their coffee beans, a starvation price which is equal to less than a third of what it costs these farmers to produce the coffee.

Fair Trade coffee, on the other hand, guarantees producers at least $1.26 per pound, a price which will steadily increase as corporations such as Starbucks are forced to begin to brew and promote Fair Trade coffee on a major scale.

Despite dubious claims that they have begun to fulfill their promises (dating back to 1995) to improve the wages and working conditions of impoverished workers, Starbucks has offered little or no evidence of action.

The public relations brochures in their cafes boast about social responsibility, but they have refused to divulge to international human rights monitors specifics on where and how they have made a difference.

Building Strength for Change

Some people have asked why the OCA is raising the issue of Fair Trade shade-grown coffee and social justice along with the issue of genetically engineered food and beverages in the Starbucks campaign.

It is our belief that the time has come to build a broader and more powerful movement against genetically engineered foods, factory farming, and chemical intensive agriculture.

One of the best ways to do this is to bring together people whose primary concerns are social justice or preserving the environment and biodiversity, with those whose passion is stopping genetic engineering and converting the world's agricultural system to organic farming as soon as possible.

In reality, all of these crucial issues are inextricably interconnected.

Genetic engineering poses a mortal threat to public health, biodiversity, and the environment, and, in addition, is being used as a tool for agribusiness monopolies to drive most of the world's two million small farmers and rural villagers off the land and replace them with a U.S.-style system of factory farming and industrial agriculture which is more conducive to corporate profits.

When it comes to our food supply; environmental preservation, sustainable development, and social and economic justice go hand-in-hand.