NEWBERRY — Last year the coffee shop Genesis Hub opened up in Downtown Newberry. While those who frequent this coffee shop may know their motto: “buy good, do good,” — they may not have considered what that means.
Eddie Long, owner of Genesis, said Fair Trade, at its core, is concerned about the end product. That is, where the product was sourced.
“For me, I thought about a chocolate bar, I would go to a store to get a chocolate bar. That chocolate bar comes from a distributor, the distributor gets it from the plant and that is as far back as my brain took me in the process of my candy bar,” Long said. “I didn’t think that the plant sourced its chocolate from a farm and sugar from a different farm and its vanilla from a different farm.”
Long said all these places that his end product started with he had zero connection with, meaning he had no idea what the labor practices were.
“Was it good for the farmers? Does it help them out? Was there slave labor involved in the farm? Is it good for the environment? You just don’t think about those kind of things,” he said. “What we wanted to do here at Genesis is enable you to do good in the world, in everything you consume.”
Long believes America gets a bad wrap for being a big consumerist place where we just consume at the expense of the rest of the world. However, he said it doesn’t have to be that way and the things we consume can actually do good in the world.
“That is the heartbeat of Genesis, you don’t have to worry about, was there slave labor in my products? Is it bad for the environment? You know the products you get here are making the world a better place just by consuming,” Long said.
So at this point, you may be wondering, How does Eddie Long know this? Well, let’s look at his coffee from Equal Exchange (equalexchange.coop). Long said this is small farmers organizing themselves into cooperatives.
“It is a small farmer joining with other small farmers to form a medium sized entity, they work with Equal Exchange, which buys the beans from the farmer and roasts them and then sends them to us, that is it,” he said. “With the locally roasted (coffee), it is small farmers selling beans to a distributor, then import those beans and we roast them here in Newberry.”
This process, according to Long, shortens the gap between the source and the consumer. Long said he has had some push back from people arguing for the free market, but Long says Fair Trade doesn’t interfere with the free market, rather works with it.
“The free market is working for those small farmers. When you have the middle men in between, in coffee supply for example. Typically people who broker deals with farmers and suppliers, supplier sells to a roaster, who sells to a distributor, who sells to the end person. The price of coffee fluctuates greatly because of those brokers,” Long said. “Your cup of coffee at a coffee chain is always five dollars, so someone always gets that money. This cuts all that out and guarantees the farmer gets a fair wage above market value, paying someone for their labor.”
So, what made Long want to bring Fair Trade coffee, and other grocery items like chocolate, to Newberry? Well, believe it or not, this journey goes back a few years when his eyes were opened to modern day slavery.
“Slavery is illegal in very country, the problem is the justice systems are not the same in the developing world,” Long said. “One of the more common ways it happens, bounded labor.”
Long explained bonded labor is when someone will take out a small loan to feed their family and the person who gave them that loan says they can work that loan off at their farm. The person will begin to work to pay off the loan, but will never work enough to pay off the loan. When the person who initially takes out the loan dies, the debt goes to their children, and so on.
“Once they get people in that, the working conditions are not good either. They can’t leave until it is paid back, there is no freedom for those people,” Long said.
Long first learned about this at the Passion Conference in Atlanta, a faith based conference for college students. During that conference they shined a light on the End It Movement (enditmovement.com), which works to end slavery globally.
“I had heard about slavery before, but that is where it became real to me. They showed videos of people’s stories, they also had some people rescued out of modern day slavery who shared their story at the conference,” Long said. “It became more than a statistic to me, it became a person. From there, I took a quiz with Made in a Free World (slaveryfootprint.org), you just put in the products you consume on a daily basis, end of it says here it how many slaves you ‘own.’”
At that point, Long said he could not delete this from his brain. He began supporting causes that work to end slavery, but he felt he was just putting band aids on wounds, instead of preventing the wounds. That’s when he started learning about supply chains.
“After doing that for a while, I watched a film that talked about the end of extreme poverty, I saw a story on there with a kid, he said ‘I’d ask God not to give me dreams, I know they’ll never come true,’” Long said.
Long said this broke his heart, and he couldn’t “just be okay” with it. So he started looking for ways to contribute — and that’s when he learned about Fair Trade.
“That’s how this place happened, fell into place, I know where I’m suppose to be,” Long said.
If you are interested in learning more about Fair Trade, or how Genesis works with Fair Trade, you can visit them at 1104b Main Street, Newberry.
