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Students Join Fair Trade Businesses Against CAFTA-DR

SEATTLE, Wash. --- Students across the country who are part of the United Students for Fair Trade (USFT) network are enlisting fair trade business leaders to call upon Congress to reject the Dominican Republic-Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA).
USFT students partner with several businesses in the internationally traded craft and coffee industries to promote products bought and sold under fair trade standards. These fair trade businesses work to ensure that small coffee farmers get a fair deal for their products. Many are taking a principled stand against CAFTA because it undermines the goals towards which they work.

"We understand the potential for trade to help impoverished countries," said Cameron Herrington, a recent graduate of University of Washington who has researched CAFTA's impact in Guatemala. "These businesses understand that when trade is conducted in a way that threatens the lives and livelihoods of the world's most vulnerable people, it is not only unfair, it is immoral."

USFT is encouraging businesses to demonstrate leadership by calling upon Congress to differentiate between trade agreements that will accomplish development goals and those that will not. Seven coffee roasters from across the country --- Just Coffee, Larry's Beans, Dean's Beans, Higher Grounds Trading Company, Peace Coffee, Thanksgiving Coffee, and Green Mountain Coffee Roasters --- have publicly declared their opposition to CAFTA, along with the national fair trade crafts retailer Ten Thousand Villages.

"As fair trade coffee roasters we are 100 percent opposed to CAFTA," said Matt Early, co-owner of Just Coffee. "As we have seen in Mexico with NAFTA, this trade agreement will weaken workers' rights, displace small farmers, degrade the environment and continue an ever-expanding race to the bottom-both in Central America and here in the U.S. At Just Coffee we support the students of USFT unconditionally in their opposition to this proposed trade agreement. CAFTA is not fair trade."

Approved by the Senate last week by a narrow margin, CAFTA is likely to come up for a vote in the House of Representatives this week. The trade agreement, if passed, will subject millions of small farmers in Central American countries and the Dominican Republic to unfair competition with heavily subsidized U.S. agribusinesses, undercutting their livelihoods and increasing endemic poverty throughout the region.

"Fair trade enables family farmers and other community-based economic entities to access global markets," said Larry Larson, chairman of Cooperative Coffees. "The net result of CAFTA is to shut down community-based economics and empower corporate control-which means more people working in sweatshop conditions and less people working the land," explained Larson.

USFT is one of dozens of organizations warning that millions of rural agricultural livelihoods in Central America will evaporate if CAFTA is ratified. This situation will contribute to workers' rights abuses, environmental degradation, and northward migration.
Student activists and businesses that practice fair trade principles are pushing their representatives to take a stand against CAFTA and for trade agreements that empower communities worldwide.

United Students for Fair Trade (USFT) is a three-year-old national network of hundreds of university and high school students advocating for fair trade products, principles, and policies.

Just Coffee --- a 100 percent fair trade coffee roaster in Madison, W.I. --- is committed to 100 percent fair trade as a business opportunity and not simply as a market opportunity. They offer micro-batch roasted, fairly-traded, naturally grown, great-tasting coffees at a low prices.
Larry's Beans --- a Raleigh, N.C. based coffee roaster --- is committed to equitable trade partnerships. It takes great pride in sharing information about the impact consumers can make by voting with their dollars.