06 November 2008
Starbucks Brews Good Relations in Guatemala
Brings education, fair trade standards to Mayan coffee communities
Washington — The Starbucks Corporation of Seattle has made helping children in coffee-farming communities in Guatemala a priority.
The company’s Guatemala Education Initiative brings multilingual, multicultural education to children living in Guatemala’s coffee-growing rural highlands. “It’s important to be involved in the communities where we do business, including Guatemala,” said Dub Hay, Starbucks’ senior vice president of coffee and global procurement.
Starbucks says it is committed to ethically sourcing and roasting the coffee it purchases and also to building connections with the communities where its beans are grown. (Guatemala provides more coffee beans to Starbucks than any other country.)
The education initiative has sent 20 Starbucks employees to help in the remote highland villages of Guatemala since 2005, Hay said.
For its commitment to Guatemalan coffee-producing communities, Starbucks has been named a finalist for the 2008 secretary of state's Award for Corporate Excellence.
Starbucks works with the U.S. Agency for International Development and the humanitarian group Save the Children to pay for teacher training, educational materials, libraries and playgrounds to benefit approximately 8,000 students living in the highlands of Guatemala.
In this area, more than 90 percent of the people are indigenous Mayans who have been marginalized from mainstream Guatemalan society. They suffer high poverty rates and low educational achievement levels, according to Save the Children’s Web site.
Through the educational initiative supported by Starbucks, USAID and Save the Children, a new curriculum has been developed to teach Guatemalan children about Mayan history and culture, secondary-school students have gained access to distance-learning programs, and schools have undergone physical improvements.
Starbucks also contributed 50 percent of the money to create the San Miguel Coffee Mill Health Clinic. The free clinic has treated nearly 4,000 people associated with the San Miguel coffee farm and mill near Antigua, Guatemala, and is the only medical care available for many area workers.
Agriculture generates the income necessary to increase demand for nonfarm production in the Guatemalan highlands, according to the USAID mission in Guatemala. For the most part, the economies of Central America still rely heavily on the agricultural sector as a source of rural employment and income generation.
Starbucks’ dedication to paying the higher prices that premium-quality coffee commands directly benefits the rural coffee farmers in Guatemala. It gives farmers more predictability and protection against the lows of the coffee commodity market and promotes economic development in the rural coffee-growing areas of Guatemala.
Starbucks has entered into a contract with coffee producers in Guatemala to ensure they receive most of what the company pays for their product, instead of a large amount going to export agents. In Starbucks’ fiscal year 2007, 96 percent of the revenue for coffee grown in Guatemala went directly to local growers and millers. Under the contract, farmers received $1.32 of the $1.37 per pound Starbucks paid for coffee beans. Guatemalan coffee exporters retained five cents of the purchase price for their costs and a small profit.
