When you wake up in the morning with a cup of coffee to get you ready for the day ahead, whether you are queuing in line at a coffee shop or steeping coffee grounds in the comfort of your home, do you know that cup of coffee is quietly casting a vote through your dollar? These votes reflect developmental issues within countries like Guatemala, Mexico and Nicaragua.

Former environmental and indigenous rights lawyer Dean Cycon was invited to present a guest lecture at Shippensburg University on Wednesday, March 4, in Grove Forum.

Cycon founded Dean’s Beans to dig deep into coffee-growing communities to uncover what is going on in the coffee trade. By working with the farming villages, Cycon slowly unraveled the intricate story of climate struggles, poverty, immigration, women’s and indigenous rights issues.

“Inside that cup are women’s rights, indigenous rights, the environment, economic issues, climate change, migration issues, war and peace,” Cycon explained. He emphasized that, whether intentional or not, consumer dollars move through systems shaped by these issues.

Primary commodity poverty is the main economic factor keeping coffee villages poor. In the supply chain, the farmer who grows the coffee receives the lowest cut, so the processing and transport managers can get the most profit. This creates a scenario in which the consumer pays $10 for a pound of coffee, the store gets $5, the exporter gets $2, the roaster gets a dollar, and the farmer gets pennies.

More often than not, farmers spend more on production than they receive from their crops, and they go into debt to stay afloat in this constructed poverty.

Farmers in these villages mostly live in rural areas, on mountains and valleys on the outskirts of cities, making them live in a microculture that primarily speaks indigenous languages instead of the colonial language spoken in the city. This language barrier leaves most communities out of politics, especially since the long working hours to produce enough to make ends meet leaves them very little time to participate in the legislative world.

Political injustice leaves an opening for a parasitic partnership between farmers and middlemen. If a farmer produces at most 40 bags of coffee per harvest, but they need at least 300 bags of coffee to trade internationally, an average farmer is forced to trade locally.

Without sufficient volume to trade in global markets, farmers rely on middlemen to consolidate their harvest and sell it abroad. These intermediaries set terms and prices, making farmers increasingly reliant on middlemen year after year.

These local dynamics are only one part of the system. On the global scale, the New York Stock Exchange and the London Stock Exchange are the main authorities for the international value of coffee. The New York Stock Exchange sets the price for Arabica coffee, while the London Stock Exchange does the same for Robusta coffee.

This system takes agency away from the farmers to set their own price, where even while taking a trip up and down the mountain they live on to sell the middleman more coffee, the value of their coffee can change.

Income from coffee makes up at least 80% of household earnings for a farming family. If the price drops, their well-being is on the line. Children are pulled from school after sixth grade because attending school is too expensive, forcing them to work on a farm from a young age.

A system like this does not appear overnight. It grows and strengthens over generations, making it difficult for families to build a secure future. Simple donations from companies, no matter how large they seem, cannot dismantle these structures. 

“Charity is not change … charity maintains systems; it doesn’t change them,” Cycon said.

Coffee is a naturally fickle plant as rainfall and temperature needs are very precise. Climate shifts shove microclimates in these communities off balance. Droughts and increased pests throw off plant maturity, increasing crop failure. The only thing farmers can do is to move further up the mountains, putting them in direct competition with endangered species.

Chemical exposer adds another layer of risk. Nearly 50% of all pesticide usage worldwide is used for coffee production. DDT, a pesticide banned from use in America because of its severe health effects on people, can be manufactured and exported for unrestricted use internationally.

Certain certifications like the Organic Certification help with environmental impacts, but are not a perfect fix, especially with copycat buzzwords that do nothing to address pesticide issues like “all-natural,” “environmentally friendly” or “rainforest.”

When a farmer's future is as uncertain as the plants they grow, continuing to farm becomes nearly impossible. When their coffee crop fails, families are forced to look for jobs in the city. Then, when that fails, they immigrate to the United States.

In analyzing immigration patterns, Cycon noted that most immigrants were from coffee villages, linking migration patterns to low coffee prices, climate shifts in the tropics and rural economic collapse.

With a clearer understanding of how indigenous communities were forced into the cycle of oppression, Cycon asked himself, “How can I help to get them out of this cycle?” The answer he arrived at was simple — get real money into farmers’ pockets.

Many organizations turn first to charity when trying to support indigenous communities, but charity is not the miracle solution that people think it is. Even consistent, high-value donations fail to address the core issue of economic agency. Charity just replaces the community’s reliance on the middleman with reliance on the philanthropist.

Cycon sought to address this issue directly with Dean’s Beans through direct community engagement. No governments, non-profit organizations or churches were involved in making a new hierarchy while breaking down the old one.

While working directly with farmers, women’s groups and local civic groups, he learned that the most important skill to aid the community is to listen. By listening to the community, Cycon built programs around community-identified issues, not outsider assumptions.

In Central America, many migrants had amputations while riding La Bestia, a freight train network, in an attempt to reach the United States. Cycon founded a cheap prosthetic workshop to train technicians in making prosthetics and making prosthetics more accessible to the injured. Amputees who received prosthetics from his workshop were offered a position in Dean’s Beans to raise awareness of their situation.

“When you buy certain kinds of coffee, your dollar votes exactly for those values,” Cycon said, emphasizing that everyday purchases move through systems shaped by these issues.

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