Santiago Riveria, a Guatemalan coffee farmer, was struggling to live on the 35 cents a pound he received from corporate middlemen who sold his produce for 10 times as much. Thanks to the fair trade movement, Riveria now has his own export company which eliminates the middleman and enables him to support his family.

“Santiago’s Story” was a short video featured at Eastern’s Fair Trade Coalition panel discussion Tuesday night at the Roberson Auditorium in Lumpkin Hall.

After the video, Sean Barth, coalition member and panel discussion moderator, spoke briefly on how the 20 million coffee farmers worldwide need alternatives like fair trade to increase their incomes and make their own gains.

Barth called fair trade a marketing and consumerist movement, and then introduced a panel which included Robert Bartford, a retired philosophy professor, David Carwell, a political science professor, Belayet Kahn, professor of geography and Roy Lanham, director of the Newman Center to add to the discussion.

Kahn, a native of Bangladesh, spoke about the the deplorable working conditions in the garment industry there, which exports 732 million garments annually to the United States, and how fair trade could help these workers.

Also concerned with the welfare of workers around the globe, Lanham said that fair trade equals human rights and helps three kinds of justice: communicative, distributive and social justice.

“The current economic system is about control and power, and fair trade flips that on its end,” Lanham said.

Carwell, who once worked in the U.S. House of Representatives, agreed that fair trade is a great idea, but as a movement, he doesn’t believe that it will ever be effective unless voters and lobbyists bring it to the government’s attention.

“If you really want to change the whole system, you have to change its politics and how power is distributed,” Carwell said.

A question and answer forum followed the discussion, and audience members inquired about how effective fair trade will be for farmers and what individuals can do to help this cause.

Barth said the ultimate goal of the coalition was to bring fair trade coffee to Eastern’s campus.

“We’ve researched the cost and, with dining services working with us, the outlook seems positive,” he said.

Mark Hudson, director of housing and dining services, also attended the forum and said that he is working with suppliers on bringing fair trade coffee here.