Coffee doesn't just come in bags, or steaming in paper cups. People tend and pick and dry and sort the stuff before it ever gets anywhere near the roasting plant, much less our lips.

Javier Eleuterio Cabadilla, of the Tehuantepec Isthmus region of Oaxaca State, in southern Mexico, is a representative of one of the communities that labor to fill our moments of harried leisure. Director of Marketing of the Union de Comunidades Indigenous de la Region del Isthmo, he was in Seattle in April to help promote Transfair's Fair Trade Coffee campaign.

The UCIRI coffee cooperative is a community effort. A type of organization called an Indigenous Union, it is democratically run, wholly by members of the community, and profits are distributed back into the community. This money pays for a farm supply center, healthcare services, cooperative corn mills, an agricultural extension and training program, housing improvements, and the region's only secondary school. The cooperative operates its coffee farms with a focus on sustainability of the local ecosystem. In short, the people of the UCIRI are taking control of their own situation.

The UCIRI, like similar cooperatives, is far different from the large majority the world's coffee producing communities. The second most valuable traded commodity, after oil, industrial coffee thrives on economic and environmental exploitation. Workers on corporate plantations are systematically cheated by their employers, and the local coffee buyers, often the neighborhood political boss with his army of paid thugs, cheat the independent farmers out of their fair price.

A single latte or espresso costs more in Seattle than a typical coffee worker makes in a whole day. Currently, wholesale prices are depressed in the face of a huge world supply of mass produced beans. Farmers are getting less and consumers are paying more.

UCIRI has become a Transfair member to help promote its fair trade coffee. And marketing, outside of the post colonial networks, is perhaps the largest challenge to autonomous coffee producers.

Transfair is a non-profit monitoring organization which certifies that participating traders are following fair trade guidelines. Coffee roasters and retailers that comply with these guidelines are allowed to use the TransFair seal on their products. Transfair helps growers committed to fair labor practices and environmental sustainability like UCIRI find buyers committed to paying a fair price for their coffee.

The cooperative started in 1982 with assistance from Catholic missionary organizations. For the first three years, they sent their coffee to Mexico City for export, waiting months to get paid. They got their own export license in 1983, but didn't have the equipment they needed until 1985. They began exporting to Europe, and are trying to break into the US market.

The UCIRI currently has over 2,500 members, and produces 101 metric tons of shade grown, 100% organic coffee every year. That cleans up into about 79 metric tons of export grade coffee beans.

When the cooperative started, there was a lot of resistance from the local power structure. The people controlling the local coffee industry attempted to undermine the community's self organizing efforts through intimidation and violence.

After the Zapatista uprising in nearby Chiapas, the government accused the cooperative of aiding the EZLN. The local school was turned into an army barracks, and there was a period of intense conflict resulting in the deaths of several campesinos.

The government looks upon the self organizing, indigenous unions as impediments to "development." The corporate friendly Fox administration's proposed tax structure includes provisions to increase the taxes paid by social organizations, like indigenous unions, in part to make up for tax incentives to the already rich.

The governor of Oaxaca Jose Murat, a rising star in the reformist wing of the PRI, has made gestures toward indigenous rights and autonomy. His state government, meanwhile, remains largely hostile to the grass roots social organizations. The government promotes its own rival groups to split the movement. The paperwork is always made as difficult as possible. Federal resources sent to the states, earmarked for the communities, don't always get where they are supposed to go.

The UCIRI is just one of many such community organizations in the global south that are engineering their own social and economic well-being outside of the corporate conveyor belts.

Transfair exists to make it easier for them to connect with us, providing us coffee we know is helping to sustain, not drain, the world.

Transfair isn't the only way to buy fair trade coffee, there are several companies that operate with fair trade principles. It's available nearly everywhere coffee beans are sold in the Seattle. But the Transfair label is designed to assure an honest standard.

It takes a little effort to find real fair trade coffee, or ask for it, amid the avalanche of offerings, but it's only a little effort. It's about taking control of our connections, our efforts and our purchases, minimizing or eliminating corporate greed and its local enforcers in the process.

And it's about mutual support with people we will never see, but whose handiwork feeds and clothes us. When we can see the human face behind our coffee, our coffee is no longer separate from our politics.