Deans Beans Serving Landmine Victims in Coffeelands

Dean Cycon, founder of CRS Coffee Program partner Dean’s Beans, has been making headlines for years – for his ads in The Village Voice challenging major coffee corporations to increase their commitment to Fair Trade, for his decision to withhold Fair Trade licensing fees from TransFair USA and return them to the farmers who grow Dean’s Beans coffee, and most recently for his active engagement around Ethiopia’s coffee trademark campaign.  Unfortunately, one of his most noble efforts has gone relatively unnoticed – his work on behalf of the Coffeelands Landmine Victims’ Trust.

Coffee farmers in dozens of countries – including six of the world’s ten leading coffee producers – are affected by landmines and unexploded ordnance (UXO) that kill hundreds of civilian noncombatants every year, including children.  The Trust, a partnership between the Polus Center and the Office of Weapons Removal and Abatement at the U.S. Department of State, educates residents of affected communities about the risks of landmines (check out the UXO playing cards below) and provides physical rehabilitation and economic development opportunities to coffee farmers who have been landmine victims. 

Dean is not only a member of the Trust’s Board of Directors, but has also been deeply involved in its work in Nicaragua, where he helped to establish the Ben Linder Café, named for an American engineer and solidarity worker who was killed in Nicaragua during the Sandinista period.  Dean donated a roaster to the café, which is a model of social responsibility in Nicaragua: it is fully accessible to people living with disabilities, its staff is integrated with persons with disabilities, it sources coffee from landmine-affected communities and its profits go to Walking Unidos, a prosthetic clinic serving poor Nicaraguans.

We have been working with Dean in recent months to try to help the Trust expand its work to coffee-growing communities that CRS serves in Viet Nam.  Stay tuned for updates on that effort.  Meantime…thank you for the important work, Dean!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 9th, 2007 and is filed under Coffee, Fair Trade, Fair Trade Federation . Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

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