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Are you ready to enter the worlds within worlds inside your cup? Come with me to coffee communities around the world. Experience their customs, cultures, their struggles and hopes. Learn how a Javatrekker participates in the lives of the farmers and their communities. The tales you are about to read are sometimes uplifting, sometimes sad. Some are humorous, some sobering. And all of them are whopping good travel yarns. Drink deep. Your coffee will never taste the sa… More >>
Javatrekker: Dispatches from the World of Fair Trade Coffee
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I learned nothing about Fair Trade,but I sure learned a lot about Dean and how grateful the many cultures of the world are to Dean, for being Dean. I thought the writing was fairly poor, the self absorbed, self congratulatory “storytelling” was over the top and I didn’t even think it was a very good travelogue. I’ve read many better books about coffee and the effect that the systems that are in place have on the farmers. I couldn’t even get all the way through the book. I was really disappointed.
Rating: 2 / 5
If other readers came away with a solid or even marginal understanding of fair trade and shade grown coffee, then they are better readers than I am. This book did not need to be a dry study, but I obtained this book hoping for more than a travelogue. He is a great storyteller and a probably a delightful guest, but beyond a few factoids (and some interesting descriptions of cultures), I barely learned anything about coffee or coffee markets. I think this books would have been greatly enhanced by more description of why things are the way they are, where and when shade grown coffee makes economic sense, how variabilites and inequities in the market could be reduced, how large the market for fair trade is and what the big players are doing, where there is fair trade but not shade grown coffee, and on and on…
Rating: 3 / 5
As one reviewer wrote, there is a lot of “I” talk in this book. Yes, and that is to be expected, given that Dean is writing about his travels. The topic of fair trade coffee, and what it means in the life of the farmers Dean writes about, is obviously a crucial part of his existence. If he didn’t care so much, Dean would not have gone out on a limb with the public statements about Newman’s Own and their relationship with Green Mountain, who buy a much smaller percentage of their coffee at fair trade prices. The writing here is touching, and funny, and should be required reading for coffee drinkers. Dean describes some harrowing experiences (roads where people fear to tread due to bandits and militia), as well as scenes of humor (being kept awake by the gospel rock band and mispronouncing crucial words at meetings of farmers). The writing is thoughtful. Must fair trade pricing take into account the factors (such as inherent corruption) in particular countries? Even the “coyote” middlemen are given an alternate consideration. We can only hope that Dean will take his company public one day, use that new cash and clout to get into the major supermarkets, and increase the amount of fair trade coffee his company can buy and the farmers can sell, and thereby improve their lives and the lives of their children.
Rating: 5 / 5
You might remember fair-trade organic coffee roaster Dean Cycon of Dean’s Beans from my profile of his company in the February, 2006 Positive Power Spotlight.
Dean’s just come out with a fascinating book: Javatrekker: Dispatches from the World of Fair Trade Coffee.
Most Americans and Europeans in the coffee industry have never met a coffee farmer, and certainly haven’t traveled to the remote indigenous communities where coffee is grown. Dean has traveled the world, meeting growers, processors, shamans, government ministers, bouncing his way down rutted goat trails, learning a few phrases of the local language (or what he thinks is the local language), getting stomach-sick on a regular basis–and having a great deal of fun. He often finds that not only is he the first coffee buyer to visit these isolated places, but often the first white man.
In the U.S., he spends a lot of time hectoring coffee executives at Starbucks and elsewhere to commit more to fair trade and to fund development projects–which he’s able to accomplish for a tiny fraction of the money a large bureaucracy would need, by using methods initiated and designed by local communities using local resources to meet local needs, in the spirit of E.F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful.
He leaves a trail not only of Dean’s Beans t-shirts and “Make Coffee Not War” bumper stickers, but a legacy of vast improvement in the lives of the villages he visits. Clean-water wells, education centers, community-owned coffee processing plants, simple hand-operated depulpers that allow coffee farmers to capture much more of the value of their crop…some of these are projects he funds directly, and others come out of the cooperatives’ share of coffee profits, made possible by the fair-trade price he pays, sometimes three times as much as the “going rate.”
Dean sums up his philosophy in the closing words of the book:
I have never been fully comfortable with what I, when I know in my heart that things can be better, more respectful, more loving, and frankly, more exciting. It pains me deeply to see cultures crumble and blow away under global pressures (or simply for lack of water), or kids’ lives go unfulfilled for want of a pencil or notebook. Javatrekking allows me the vehicle to explore my own relationship to these things and to take responsibility where I can. These may be small contributions in the greater scheme of things, but as an old Indonesian farmer advised me…” Add your light to the sum of lights.”
Dean has clearly taken that advice seriously. His many initiatives include forming the Coffeelands Landmine Victims Trust, which works in Central America and Vietnam, co-founding Cooperative Coffees, an association of 23 local coffee roasters around the U.S. and Canada who offer fair trade organic coffee, and simply funding scholarships for individual children of coffee growers in Ethiopia and Papua New Guinea.
Dean Cycon is living proof that it is more than possible to use business as a force for positive social change, while at the same time see the world and have a terrific time.
Published sustainably on recycled paper by Chelsea Green (publisher of my own book Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World), Javatrekker is full of well-told stories and includes some great color photos. It’s available from Dean’s Beans or from the publisher.
Dean Cycon, who happens to be a signer of the Business Ethics Pledge, has pledged to donate 100% of the profits to coffee farmers.
Shel Horowitz’s award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First, demonstrates how to build a business around ethics, environmental sustainability, and cooperative practices–and how to develop marketing that highlights those advantages.
Rating: 5 / 5
I started reading Javatrekker over a cup of anonymous black coffee. By the time I had finished, a steaming mug of Dean’s Beans Sumatran roast hovered over my lips, and I took a sip: the coffee was delicious and, best of all, I knew where it came from and what my caffeine buzz was supporting. This is the great gift of Javatrekker. You close the cover with a profoundly deep understanding of the global dimensions of the coffee trade.
But this is not all that Dean Cycon, the owner of Dean’s Beans Organic Coffee, offers in his first book. Cycon recounts his travels and travails through Ethiopia and Kenya to the peaks of the Andes and the northern provinces of Sumatra (and beyond!) with humor, integrity and intelligence. His stories are engaging, and they offer an unprecedented glimpse into the history of your morning cup of coffee.
Javatrekker is peppered with fascinating pieces of trivia and pricelessly humorous anecdotes.
THE BOTTOM LINE: If you’re a coffee drinker, you need to read this book. If you’re not, you should read it anyway. Cycon is a true role model for corporate social responsibility, and even if we all can’t lead a life of javatrekking, we can benefit from Cycon’s knowledge of the global coffee market and his experience working with coffee farmers all over the world. As consumers, we should know where our money is going, but it’s often hard to follow the money trail. With Cycon’s help, we can all begin to piece together the truth about our morning jolt.
Rating: 5 / 5