A group of Eastern students are campaigning for students’ and university approval for a “little more expensive” type of coffee that gives more profits to the farmer and helps improve their “terrible” quality of life.

The students of the EIU Fair Trade Coalition have spent the past two months with Fair Trade Coffee on their minds and are campaigning for this non-pesticide, shade-grown coffee on Eastern’s campus.

Chris Lempa, co-chair of the EIU Fair Trade Coalition, and 15 other students will be in Coleman Hall Wednesday from

9 a.m. to 3 p.m. to advertise the coffee and allow for students and faculty to sign their petition for Eastern to put Fair Trade coffee in all dining halls, Lempa said Tuesday.

Fair Trade is a brand of coffee that grows coffee beans without pesticides and 88 percent is certified organic, which means it is shade-grown. Other coffee brands that do not grow their beans in the shade add extra chemicals to help them grow, Lempa said.

In addition, with Fair Trade coffee, farmers receive a greater percent of the profits compared to other brands, which helps them to better support their family.

Lempa said farmers receive 25 to 50 cents per pound of beans with other brands of coffee, but with Fair Trade, farmers receive at least $1.26 per pound and an additional 15 cents if the beans are certified organic.

Also a benefit for the farmers is that Fair Trade coffee eliminates the “corrupt middlemen,” in coffee production and selling, Lempa said, so instead of middlemen who charge “ridiculous high interest rates,” Fair Trade farmers set democratically run cooperatives. With this system, farmers are the middlemen.

Through these aspects of Fair Trade, farmers can get out of the life they spend “stuck in poverty, struggling to survive” and provide more than a “salted tortilla” for dinner for their families, as well as themselves, Lempa said.

“We’re going to improve life across the globe,” he said. “Just something we as Americans can do.”

However, Fair Trade coffee is a jump in prices compared to what Eastern offers currently, but Lempa said the price is not much in exchange for helping the

farmers.

“It’s the right thing to do,” he said. “In the long run it’s definitely worth it.”