Proof is in the Numbers:--Take a look at Starbucks tycoon's income versus one of his impoverished plantation workers:

The corporate tycoon: Howard Schultz

Andrew Gumbel The Independent (UK)

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/environment/story.jsp?story=72729

17 May 2001

Name: Howard Schultz Nationality: American Age: 47

Dependents: Wife Sheri and two children, Jordan and Addison

Residence: A large house overlooking Lake Washington, in the exclusive Madison Park district of Seattle

Income: $2.1m (£1.5m) in 2000, not including share holdings and option schemes

Coffee has been very good to Howard Schultz, the chairman and chief global strategist of Starbucks. The precocious kid from Brooklyn is now overlord of a worldwide business empire that has turned into a true cultural phenomenon: the chain-style coffee shop where no latte is too grande.

Starbucks has more than 4,000 branches worldwide, with an average of three more opening every day. About 2,700 outlets are in the United States and more than 100 in the United Kingdom. There are even plans to bring Starbucks to Italy. Ever since he talked his way into the management of Starbucks in 1982 (then a bean-selling operation in Seattle), turned it into a retail outfit and eventually bought the whole enterprise, he has been driven by an almost missionary zeal to bring his version of the Italian coffee experience to a worldwide audience.

The corporate culture at Starbucks is, like Schultz, easy-going and concerned with a sense of community. Staff are well paid and enjoy generous benefit packages. However, there has been criticism by anti-globalisation protesters of Starbucks' coffee-buying practices and identikit outlets. Schultz's response has been typical: hurt indignation and an anxiety to make amends. Starbucks now sells Fair Trade Certified beans in 2,300 of its outlets (but does not yet use them in the coffee it brews for its customers). Schultz has just bought himself a $200m (£140m) controlling stake in the Seattle SuperSonics basketball team.

The coffee grower: Tatu Museyni

Cahal Milmo 17 May 2001

Name: Tatu Museyni Nationality: Tanzanian Age: 37

Dependents: Six children, aged between 3 and 17

Residence: Mud hut with corrugated iron roof. No running water or electricity

Income: £30 per year

For Tatu Museyni, the plunge in the price she is paid for her coffee crop grown in the lush foothills of Mount Kilimanjaro has had two simple effects: "My children don't go to school and we starve."

A widow, she relies on the income from her 30 coffee trees in the village of Kishimundu, north Tanzania. She has little time for the far-off machinations of the international coffee market - other than to note with incomprehension and despair that they have cut the money she receives in half in less than a year.

Impoverished growers in Kishimundu and the surrounding communities now receive 19p for every pound of Arabica beans they produce compared to an already meagre 40p paid last year.

The result is that Tatu, who lost her husband three years ago and struggles to maintain her quarter-acre smallholding, has seen what she earns from her main cash crop fall from £13 to £6.21. This is her reward for working 12 hours a day and travelling up to 14 miles to collect water and provisions. On such an income, the battle to pay the £14 annual fee needed to send her two daughters - Angera, 15, and 13-year-old Mary - to the village school becomes impossible.

She said: "Education is very important. It will help my children to have a better life. But now it is difficult to pay. Sometimes my children are chased out of school because I can't pay."

The mother, whose dead husband's family refuse to give her financial help because of a land dispute, has abandoned plans to send her third child, Isaiah, nine, to the school. Instead, she is considering selling her pig, her "savings" in north Tanzania's agrarian economy, to buy her two daughters some extra time at school.

For another look at a struggling coffee farmer's life, go here