‘Fair trade’ coffee has become as much a staple of the middle-class kitchen as organic carrots and free-range eggs. But, for the fair-trade lobby, voluntary gestures are not enough. They are lobbying the US government, with some signs of success, to establish a ‘coffee purity act’. Under these provisions, all raw or ‘green’ coffee imported to America would have to show a moisture content of between 8 and 13 per cent and would have to contain no extraneous matter such as leaves and twigs.
Few would fancy a twig or two floating around in their cappuccino, but that is not the point. All green coffee is purified before it reaches a grinder in Islington or Greenwich Village; the only purpose in a coffee purity act would be to reserve the wholesale market for Central American family farmers, who pick their coffee by hand and so are better able to control at source what goes into their coffee bags than are farmers who harvest by machine.
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