Associated Press
September 18, 2001

LONDON - Protests against the world's leading retail coffee chain, Starbucks Corp., began this week in the United States and Europe to promote fairly traded coffee - coffee where the grower is guaranteed a minimum price that is typically above the market price.

The protests will last all week and target stores in 300 cities, said Ronnie Cummins, national director of the United States Organic Consumers Association, which is coordinating the action. The group is leafleting Starbucks' customers to pressure the Seattle-based company, now in some 4,500 locations worldwide, into promoting fairly traded coffees, not just stocking them, and ensuring that none of its ingredients are genetically modified, Dow Jones News Service reported.

"We are targeting Starbucks, rather than (any other coffee company) because they are a high-profile market leader and because they promote themselves as socially responsible," Cummins said.

Fair-trade coffees guarantee growers a minimum $1.26 a pound for arabica coffee and $1.06 a pound for robusta, along with longer-term contracts and other social and environmental benefits. That compares with an average world market price of 60 cents per pound for arabica and 25 cents per pound for robusta.

Starbucks' Britain spokeswoman Yasmin Crowther said, "Starbucks is totally behind fair-trade." She said it stocks the coffees in the United States and is now in talks with fair-trade providers in Britain to introduce these coffees in its 200-plus British stores in the next year.

Crowther said genetically modified ingredients aren't used in Europe, and even in the United States the company offers an organic-milk alternative to ordinary milk