Wrestling with Starbucks: Conscience, Capital, Cappuccino

Chapter 8: At the Global Crossroads

163 At the Global Crossroads 8 Tadesse Meskela, general manager of the Oromia Coffee Farmers Cooperative Union in Ethiopia, an organization of 115 cooperatives representing more than 102,000 coffee growers, apparently had mixed feelings about Starbucks. In an interview transcript from a June 2006 Starbucks meeting on African coffees, he spoke warmly about the company’s role in advancing the well-being of Ethiopian coffee farmers: “This year we sold more coffee to Starbucks and they paid us a very good price, which is better than Fair Trade price. So we want this type of pricing for our coffees to improve the lives of coffee growers.” Yet there he was in Black Gold, a documentary released that year to wide acclaim. Filmed between 2003 and 2005, it followed Tadesse’s valiant struggle to increase the income that Ethiopian coffee farmers realize from their crops. It also featured Starbucks as villain , implying that the company made its millions off the backs of poor farmers. For a while, Dub Hay, Starbucks’ senior vice president for coffee purchasing, wondered if Tadesse had been unaware that the film was going to portray Starbucks as a bad guy. After all, the company had been involved with Ethiopia for more than thirty years, even before the arrival of Howard Schultz, and had been buying coffee from the Oromia Farmers Union since 2003. But Dub hoped in vain. Tadesse was in fact a man on a mission; and in the fall of 2006, he emerged as a key spokesperson for the Ethiopian government and for the international anti-poverty NGO Oxfam. Their prime demand was that Starbucks recognize Ethiopia’s right to trademark the names of its gourmet coffee regions. “Coffee shops can sell Sidamo and Harar coffees for up to $26 a pound because of the beans’ specialty status,” Tadesse said in an Oxfam press release. “But Ethiopian coffee farmers only earn between sixty cents to $1.10 for their crop, barely enough to cover the cost of production. I think most people would see that as an injustice.” If Starbucks felt betrayed by the two faces of Tadesse, Tadesse felt betrayed by the two faces of Starbucks. Yes, it pays better than fair trade prices and is arguably the most ethical major coffee company in the world. But it also uses its reputation to avoid sharing real power. The conflict over Ethiopia’s right to trademark its coffee lasted for roughly two years and involved three continents, a slew of public demonstrations, and a steady stream of media reports. The themes echoed those that had ignited the 1999 Battle of Seattle: economic relations between the global south and the global north and the role of corporations in translating capitalism for performance on the world stage. While flat-worlders like New York Times columnist and author Thomas Friedman enthused over the opportunities, not to mention the inevitabilities, of globalization, detractors saw it as a new version of imperialism, a way for the north to munch up both material and cultural assets. “Do we really need a Starbucks on every corner of every city in the world?” asked political theorist Benjamin Barber in the Philanthropy News Digest. “That’s not economic competition ; that’s cultural monopoly, and it ends up destroying local cultures .” Even Friedman acknowledged that, without some push back, the “electronic herd” of global finance will turn indigenous culture “into a global mush, and their environment into a global mash.” By 2006 Starbucks was certainly a global player. Though Schultz originally conceived of the company as a vehicle to import coffeehouse culture to the United States, he soon discovered he could export his own version back to Europe and to anywhere else in the world that seemed ready for the Starbucks coffee experience. As he told his shareholders at the 2006 annual meeting, “In 1996, we began to dream we could be an international business”; and that same year the company opened its first overseas store, in Tokyo. By 1999 Starbucks was solidifying its presence in Britain and aiming to have five hundred European stores by the end of 2003. By early 2006, 164 W R E S T L I N G W I T H S TA R B U C K S Starbucks had more than 3,000 company-owned and licensed stores outside the United States in thirty-seven countries. Its feet were firmly planted in China, its...