Write 5 pages with APA style on Fair Trade versus Multinational Coffee. Once the seeds ripen, the berries get collected, processed, and later dried to collect the seeds. The collected seeds are roasted to varying flavors extents depending on the preferred. The seeds are later ground and then brewed to produce coffee that is sold and consumed worldwide.

Coffee is among popular drinks liked by many in the world. It has become a booming industry with an average of 12,000 cups of coffee being bought every second in North America (Fairtrade Canada, 2013). Because of this demand, coffee farmers are forced to work for less than fair wages averaging $0.45 per pound of coffee produced. The farmers work extra hard to meet the high demand for coffee in the world yet receive peanuts from their labor. This is quite demoralizing, insensitive, and inhuman considering the amount of time, energy, as well as resources spent in cultivating the product. For instance, coffee farmers spend massive resources fighting over 900 coffee pests, use fertilizer to boost yields as well as spend time caring for the plant until it matures after four years and readies for harvesting.

Coffee farming is, therefore, labor intensive with frequent little financial return. Considering the energy, time, and resources spent in coffee cultivation is such an effort worth $0.45 per pound of coffee. Thus, the majority of coffee farmers incur losses since they receive fewer payments compared to the cost incurred in producing the coffee since they cannot respond promptly to the fluctuating world coffee prices (Haight, 2011). This compels them to sell their hard labored produce at low prices to the intermediaries who ferry them to the multinational companies for processing. From concerns above, it is true that coffee farmers are underpaid and thus leave in deplorable conditions characterized by cycles of debt and poverty despite their massive effort in ensuring that the world does not experience a shortage of the coffee product.