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It's very comfortable to believe Starbucks is doing the right thing -- and to some degree, they are," said Eric Perkunder, a Seattle resident who worked as a Starbucks environmental manager in the 1980s and '90s. "They lull us into complacency. The stores are comfortable. You see pictures of people from origin countries. You believe certain things they are telling you. But there's more to the story."
Dirt road, stick huts
Part of that story lies in the southwestern corner of Ethiopia, in a swath of mountains not far from the Sudan border. There, a dirt road snakes through one of the country's largest coffee plantations -- the Ethiopia Gemadro Estate -- and comes to a halt in a dense mat of reeds and grasses.
A narrow path winds through the thicket and spills out into a clearing of stick huts. This is the home of an African Sheka tribe that for generations has lived off the land -- catching fish, gathering wild honey and trapping animals in the forest. They call themselves the Shabuyye.
"The land over there used to belong to our forefathers," said Yatola, the tribal member in his 20s, as he nodded toward the plantation.
Conflict with local people and tribes is growing across southwest Ethiopia as coffee and tea plantations spread into the region under the government's effort to sow more development. At Gemadro, 2,496 acres of coffee were planted from 1998 to 2001 on land the company obtained from the government in a countylike jurisdiction called the Sheka Zone.
"One of Ethiopia's last remaining forests, Sheka Forest, is under huge pressure. ... The rate of deforestation is now increasing and threatens the forest biodiversity ... and the very livelihood" of forest-dwelling tribes, says the 2006 annual report of Melca Mahiber, an environmental group in the nation's capital, Addis Ababa.
However, Haile Michael Shiferaw, the plantation's manager -- who attended the Long Beach coffee conference -- said the Gemadro Estate had not displaced any tribe members.
"Before our farm was started," he said, "very few people were living in Gemadro."
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