CANTON, Mass. - A poster on a wall at Equal Exchange, a food cooperative here, asks a question that literally hangs over the heads of its employees: What would Jesus drink?
The answer, they say, is brewing in thousands of places of worship around the country: "fair trade" coffee.
For the past eight years, Equal Exchange, which imports so-called fair-trade coffee, tea and cocoa, has made partnerships with missionary groups, religious organizations and individual churches to help them switch from mass-produced cans of coffee to beans bought directly from coffee cooperatives at prices that guarantee a living wage to small farmers in 17 countries.
By exporting the coffee themselves, farmers earn considerably more a pound than if they sold through industry middlemen. Equal Exchange said it paid the cooperatives $1.26 a pound for regular coffee and $1.41 a pound for organic coffee. On the international market, coffee for March delivery closed at 63.25 cents a pound this week.
"For these small farmers who are feeling the benefit of this project, it's enormous," said Erbin Crowell, director of the Equal Exchange Interfaith Coffee Program.
The company, founded in 1986, is trying to market fair-trade chocolate and sugar as well, Mr. Crowell said.
Rodney North, whose title at Equal Exchange is "answer man," said the company had about 30 percent of the fair-trade coffee market in the United States and about one one-thousandth of the country's coffee market.
The churches and the company call the partnership a natural. Coffee hour is an integral part of Sunday worship for many denominations, as are commitments to social justice and missionary work. Drinking fair-trade coffee, leaders of these groups say, is a way to live out that commitment daily.
Religious organizations can buy the coffee for $5 to $7 a pound, a per-pound discount of roughly $1.50 from supermarket prices. The company created a special coffee, Fellowship Blend <http://www.equalexchange.com/products/percolator.html>, for use in large percolators. Ten one-pound packages cost $50. . . .
<http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/27/national/27RELI.html> ***** -- Yoshie
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