Just Coffee Caffeine with a Conscience

Just Coffee Caffeine with a Conscience by Mark Adams and Tommy Bassett. Paperback edition. ISBN: 9780981797601.

This is a story about the collaboration between a Presbyterian Pastor, a displaced coffee farmer and an outsourced industrialist who came together on the Sonora Mexico, Arizona USA border to help form a small coffee cooperative in a community in Chiapas, Mexico. The 3 friends dreamed, schemed and gleaned a plan that involved creating a Fair Trade Plus Coffee Cooperative. Fair Trade Plus is the, spirit of fair trade; where the growers actually own and control the most value added steps and therefore receive the majority of the profits from the sales. In this case the small community of Salvador Urbina, in mountains of Chiapas discovered a way to roast and ship their coffee to customers in the USA with in a week of receiving the order. They innovated and created synergy between the cultures of Mexico and the USA to build relationships between the growers and drinkers of this fine, high mountain coffee that is famous for its drink-ability and smooth, acid-free character. The cooperative directly address the root cause of undocumented migration from this part of Mexico into the USA; poverty. Humorous insights into the clash of the cultures are interspersed with first hand observations on poverty and migration. The book brings to life the growers in Mexico and folks from the USA that came together and helped the cooperative. It is a story of relationships. The Just Coffee Cooperative story is a journey where people of faith on both sides of the border came together to help make this dream become a reality. The 128 page book details the birth and growth of the cooperative as it struggled to become a visible example of the link between faith, migration and coffee. The book has lots of excellent photos of the coffee, growers and their community, interesting facts on migration in an innocent yet provoking invitation to put faith in action to address one of the most controversial and contentious issues of our times; undocumented immigration into the USA from Mexico.