Coffee farms range in size from holdings of just a few acres to much more expansive, fully mechanized estates covering many thousands of acres. More than half of the world's coffee beans are grown by small-scale farmers. In Mexico, for example, about 90 percent of coffee farms are 12.5 acres or smaller, the majority of them owned by indigenous people. Coffee is a notably labor-intensive crop. It takes one to three years before a tree produces 2,000 cherries, which is only enough to make a single pound of roasted coffee. At harvest time, whole families handpick coffee cherries from dawn to dusk. It's crucial that they pluck the cherries at just the right moment or the quality suffers. After they separate the pulp of the fruit from the seeds, sift out the husks, and wash and dry the coffee beans, growers sell their harvest to local traders.

Sources include: International Coffee Organization; TransFair USA; Gregory Dicum and Nina Luttinger, The Coffee Book: Anatomy of an Industry From Crop to the Last Drop (New York City: The New Press, 1999); Laure Waridel, Coffee With Pleasure (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 2001); Mark Pendergrast, Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World (New York City: Basic Books, 1999); Faisal Islam, "Counting the Real Cost of a Cup of Coffee," Manchester Guardian Weekly (Jan. 1, 2003); Nicholas Stein, "Crisis in a Coffee Cup," Fortune Magazine (Dec. 9, 2002); Kim Bendheim, "Global Issues Flow Into America's Coffee," New York Times (Nov. 3, 2002); Peter Fritsch, "Coffee Bean Oversupply Deepens Latin America's Woes," The Wall Street Journal (July 8, 2002); John M. Talbot, "Information, Finance and the New International Inequality: The Case of Coffee," The Journal of World-Systems Research VII, no. 2 (spring 2002).

Photo credits: The photographs on the "Growers," "Local Traders," and "Your Allocations" pages are by Bill Kinzie, courtesy of Green Mountain Coffee Roasters.

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