The Café Femenino Foundation Story

The Café Femenino Foundation was first con­ceived in 2004 through the inspi­ra­tion of a group of women in Peru who decided to change their sit­u­a­tion in life and cre­ate their own orga­ni­za­tion and their own cof­fee prod­uct.  Women in most cof­fee com­mu­ni­ties through­out the world have no rights, they are une­d­u­cated, they are poor, and live in iso­lated rural com­mu­ni­ties.  Without rights, liv­ing in poverty and iso­la­tion, women are often abused, and they have no voice in their fam­ily.  So the Café Femenino Foundation was cre­ated to ben­e­fit women and their fam­i­lies in cof­fee com­mu­ni­ties around the world.

The foun­da­tion was licensed by the IRS as a 501©(3) in December 2004.  A week later, the tsunami hit in Sumatra, so the first thing the foun­da­tion did was work to raise funds to help the vic­tims in the rural cof­fee com­mu­ni­ties in Aceh, Sumatra.  Funds went directly to cof­fee coop­er­a­tives that used the funds to pur­chase water, rice, and funeral cloths for those who lost their lives.  Since that time, the foun­da­tion has funded grants in Kenya, Rwanda, Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, Mexico, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Dominican Republic, and Haiti.  The foun­da­tion works to raise funds to be able to fund grants that are received directly from cof­fee orga­ni­za­tions in all these coun­tries.  The door is open to hear the needs of these impov­er­ished small pro­duc­ers.  The requests are as var­ied as the coun­tries they live in.  Over the years, the foun­da­tion has funded grants for health train­ing pro­grams, san­i­ta­tion, can­cer screen­ings, schools, libraries, water projects, school books, food secu­rity that involves, ani­mal breed­ing pro­grams, quinoa pro­duc­tion, com­mu­nity gar­dens, and can­ning.  The foun­da­tion has funded income diver­si­fi­ca­tion such as weav­ing, embroi­dery, roast­ing and sell­ing their own cof­fee, micro-lending pro­grams, candy pro­duc­tion, and fruit tree pro­duc­tion.  The Café Femenino Foundation lis­tens to the needs of these small pro­duc­ers and is open to fund­ing all types of aid projects.  The funds are gen­er­ally over­seen by the cof­fee orga­ni­za­tions them­selves or by local NGO’s.  Construction projects such as schools or irri­ga­tion projects are done by the pro­duc­ers and the com­mu­ni­ties them­selves keep­ing project cost to a min­i­mum and allow­ing the foun­da­tion to accom­plish a great deal with the small­est cost possible.

The Café Femenino Foundation is an all-volunteer orga­ni­za­tion.  Funds come from dona­tions and fundrais­ing by com­pa­nies and indi­vid­u­als work­ing within the cof­fee indus­try.  Other orga­ni­za­tions such as churches and Soroptimists have also been donors to the foun­da­tion.  Coffee Fest, which puts on sev­eral regional trade shows each year, gra­ciously donates show floor space in every show to enable the foun­da­tion hold a Bid for Hope Silent Auction to help raise funds.  All items in this auc­tion are donated by the com­pa­nies that are exhibitors at each of the show.  This year, for the first time, the Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA) is also donat­ing show floor space to hold the “Call to Auction” silent auc­tion to help sup­port the Café Femenino Foundation.  All vol­un­teers in the foun­da­tion even pay their own way to each of the trade shows.  So the only money that the foun­da­tion spends is for mar­ket­ing, allow­ing the foun­da­tion to be able to donate most of the funds to fund the many grant requests that come into the foun­da­tion every year.

The reward for all the work that the foun­da­tion does every year to help these poverty stricken com­mu­ni­ties comes directly from these com­mu­ni­ties when we can see a home that now has clean run­ning water or a child that now can speak because he had cleft pal­let surgery through the rela­tion­ship the foun­da­tion main­tains with the Faces Foundation, located in Portland, Oregon.  We have seen the level of poverty improve, and we’ve seen cul­tural changes where women are now being respected because the woman now is able to gen­er­ate her own income.  Girls go to school where once they did not.  A com­mu­nity where all chil­dren failed school because of a lack of any resources or books now has its own library and a trained librar­ian is there to help the chil­dren learn.  So many won­der­ful things are hap­pen­ing in so many coun­tries due to the work of the Café Femenino Foundation.  But there are still so many fam­i­lies around the world that need help; there is still so much work to do.  We hope the cof­fee indus­try will con­tinue to help and sup­port the work of the Café Femenino Foundation.

2012 Editor’s Prologue

First a lit­tle house­keep­ing, the arti­cles in this issue are the ideas and opin­ions of the writ­ers and do no NECESSARILY rep­re­sent the opin­ions of CoffeeTalk and the Daily Dose or its employee – includ­ing me! I would have thought that this was pretty obvi­ous but appar­ently not. Maybe we all have become so jaded to the way news is pre­sented and manip­u­lated that the idea that we might print an opin­ion from some­one that dis­agrees with our own edi­to­r­ial view just doesn’t seem pos­si­ble to some. We at CoffeeTalk take the idea of fair and bal­anced seri­ously and so we print oppos­ing ideas to our own – weird, huh?

There, that is out of the way!

Editor’s Prologue

December 21, 2012

As 2012 draws to a close, I would like to just say that I for one am extremely grate­ful that a giant fire­ball thrown off by the sun did not cre­mate the entire earth. I see that as a huge pos­i­tive – just saying.

During this past year, sev­eral fes­ter­ing issues have finally bro­ken through into the lime­light. The fore­most of these are, in my opin­ion and in no spe­cial order…

• The accep­tance of the real­ity of Climate Change
• Emerging Latin con­sumer power in the US mar­ket
• Market accep­tance of the OMG fac­tor regard­ing the health ben­e­fits of coffee

Others of course will have their own lists, but these are my favorites. During this com­ing year, I see these items expand­ing and redefin­ing our approach to so many fac­tors of the cof­fee busi­ness includ­ing; sup­ply, mar­ket­ing, fla­vor pro­files, new prod­uct devel­op­ment, store design, and other essen­tial busi­ness elements.

Climate change has been one of those sub­jects that have lin­gered in the issue bag for years. I know that we at CoffeeTalk have been shout­ing about it for well over seven years. Finally, the impact on cof­fee and the sup­ply chain has become so obvi­ous that even those who think that the idea of cli­mate change being dan­ger­ous to our well being is so much bologna have come to believe that there is some­thing going on. I think that the accu­mu­la­tion of dev­as­tat­ing nat­ural weather dis­as­ters cou­pled with crop fail­ures in Colombia, Central America, and Africa as well as drought and polit­i­cal insta­bil­ity caused by food inequity, finally woke deci­sion mak­ers up. Unfortunately in the sci­en­tific cof­fee com­mu­nity, the gen­eral opin­ion is that it is too late to fix the cli­mate and instead we must hurry to mit­i­gate the dis­as­trous effects of cli­mate change.

At ASIC (Association for Science and Information on Coffee) this year, Climate Change and Sustainability were the pri­mary sub­ject lines through­out the entire con­fer­ence. The wide con­sen­sus was that talk of avoid­ance is long past; the industry’s only choice now is to respond to the effects. Wide pest and dis­ease infes­ta­tion, drought or, equally bad, exces­sive mois­ture, nature’s impact on infra­struc­ture, tem­per­a­ture changes, loss of opti­mum farm­lands and other impacts can no longer be halted by behav­ioral and indus­trial changes, we can only mit­i­gate the effects.

Emerging Latin Consumer power in the US mar­ket. If there is one take-away from the recent elec­tions in the US, it is that the power is no longer held exclu­sively by old white males. The same is true for con­sumerism. Rapidly expand­ing mid­dle class pop­u­la­tions that have not been tra­di­tional con­sumers of spe­cialty cof­fee are rapidly emerg­ing as impor­tant demo­graphic lead­ers – key to this is the Latin Community. How can we as an indus­try con­tinue to ignore Latin con­sumers when we know they embrace the spe­cialty cof­fee cul­ture, just look at Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil for exam­ples? Look no fur­ther than the Latin con­sumer in America if you are hop­ing to expand mar­ket share!

Second on the list of major changes this year has to be the extra­or­di­nary story of the emer­gence of cof­fee as a healthy bev­er­age. After spend­ing the bet­ter part of the last cen­tury jus­ti­fy­ing the con­sump­tion of cof­fee as a kind of sin­ful plea­sure, what a sur­prise it is to be able to hon­estly talk about the remark­able pre­ven­ta­tive health ben­e­fits of brewed cof­fee. We are pur­vey­ors of the elixir of life, the cure for can­cer, and the keys to the Land of OZ. Coffee as a healthy alter­na­tive to caf­feinated sodas is so for­eign a con­cept that many in cof­fee are skep­ti­cal of our own facts. Taken in mod­er­a­tion, less than 5 cups per day, cof­fee reduces the risk of Type 2 dia­betes, can­cer of the pan­creas, colon, pros­trate, liver, and other organs, onset and deep­en­ing of Alzheimer’s, onset of Parkinson’s dis­ease, and so many other mal­adies. It is the golden age of cof­fee and health. Hurrah!

In the com­ing year, we expect that nutraceu­ti­cal prod­ucts derived from green cof­fee will flood the mar­ket with expan­sion into beauty prod­ucts, nutri­tion sup­ple­ments, and pre­ven­ta­tive medicines.

These are just some of our takes on the past, and the com­ing year. In this issue, you will read the ideas and thoughts of over 35 other con­trib­u­tors from a wide rep­re­sen­ta­tion of our indus­try. These rep­re­sent some of the most impor­tant lead­ers of both pri­vate and non-profit orga­ni­za­tions weigh­ing in on the impor­tant issues of our busi­ness. We hope that you enjoy this year’s port­fo­lio of writ­ers and they pro­voke thoughts about your own busi­ness and your role in our wider global community.

Thank you for your ongo­ing loy­alty, con­stant read­ers, and we look for­ward to con­tin­u­ing to bring you closer to the issues that mat­ter to you most dur­ing the com­ing year. And thank you to our writ­ers and con­trib­u­tors who braved the pos­si­bil­ity of the destruc­tion of the world and still made our dead­lines to bring you these stories.

Ending Poverty 
Through Land Ownership

Contact Name: Nathan Hawkins

Website: www.agros.org
Location: Mexico, Central America
Email Address: nathanh@agros.org
Phone Number: 206−528−1066

Project Description

Agros is founded on the con­vic­tion that the rural poor can and should be empow­ered to take con­trol of their own destiny

Agros, (Latin for “land,”) has been help­ing to break the cycle of poverty for land­less, rural, poor fam­i­lies in Mexico and Central America since 1982. By offer­ing access to agri­cul­tural land, long-term credit, and train­ing in sus­tain­able farm­ing tech­niques and com­mu­nity devel­op­ment, fam­i­lies who were once migrant pick­ers and the like are able to start, develop and even­tu­ally own homes, farms, and the busi­nesses they cre­ate for themselves.

As an aware­ness of the plight of those at ori­gin grows, peo­ple are gain­ing an under­stand­ing of what the cof­fee farm­ing fam­ily endures in order to pro­duce their prod­uct. Months of hunger, lack of edu­ca­tion and lim­ited access to health­care are only some of the chal­lenges they face. Imagine though, being on the eco­nomic level below that even of the small cof­fee farmer, on the level of the migrant cof­fee picker’s fam­ily, who not only make a dis­mal wage for a short period out of the year, but also have noth­ing to sus­tain the basic needs of rais­ing a fam­ily; shel­ter, food, clean water, and most impor­tantly, secure fam­ily relationships.

These are the peo­ple Agros International seeks out. Through Agros’ unique, time-tested, prac­ti­cal assis­tance, poor fam­i­lies gain the land and skills to build a bet­ter future. While respect­ing the knowl­edge, spir­i­tu­al­ity, and expe­ri­ence of the peo­ple, Agros sup­ports train­ing that brings about change in the whole per­son and the whole com­mu­nity. Agros offers step-by-step assis­tance and train­ing in the fol­low­ing areas:

• Community and lead­er­ship development
• Sustainable farm­ing tech­niques through diver­si­fied agri­cul­tural production
• Building homes, self-composting latrines, com­mu­nity build­ings, roads, schools and more
• Family Health and child well-being assess­ment and education
• Business and mar­ket development

Agros believes that those who pay for goods and ser­vices retain a greater amount of dig­nity and develop a stronger sense of own­er­ship than those who learn to expect oth­ers to meet their needs for them. Agros mate­r­ial and finan­cial sup­port is for a lim­ited time. Therefore, the fam­i­lies who par­tic­i­pate must even­tu­ally sup­port them­selves through pro­duc­tive enter­prises, viable social struc­tures, and sus­tain­able man­age­ment of nat­ural resources. The great suc­cess of Agros’ model is evi­denced by the thou­sands of fam­i­lies who have paid off their land and micro-loans in the short span of five to ten years. Land own­er­ship is key to erad­i­cat­ing poverty.

Who Benefits From This Project?

Coffee is the main income-producing crop for many Agros vil­lages. Of Agros part­ner com­mu­ni­ties, 44 are pro­duc­ing cof­fee for com­mer­cial sale: 3 in Nicaragua, 1 in Honduras and 40 in Guatemala. Where pos­si­ble, Agros has worked with com­mu­ni­ties to secure con­tracts for inter­na­tional export, as well as facil­i­tat­ing direct trade relationships.

How Can I Help?

YOU CAN CHANGE LIVES. Visit 
www.agros.org to learn prac­ti­cal ways to get your staff, cus­tomers and com­mu­nity excited about mak­ing a dif­fer­ence in the lives of cof­fee farm­ing fam­i­lies. Go on a “Vision Trip” to see Agros’ in action and join in this wor­thy work.

Coffee Kids

Contact Name: Carolyn Fairman

Website: www.coffeekids.org
Location: Mexico
Email Address: info@coffeekids.org
Phone Number: 505−820−1443

Project Description

Coffee has always been a boom or bust crop, a volatile agri­cul­tural com­mod­ity. While prices dur­ing boom years are sig­nif­i­cantly higher than dur­ing bust years, they are decep­tive. Often when prices are high, the cost of pro­duc­tion is equally high, and farm­ers still do not earn what they need to sur­vive the year with­out great sacrifice.

Fairtrade and other pre­mi­ums have helped estab­lish bet­ter prices and pro­vide ben­e­fits for small-scale farm­ers. They also pro­vide roast­ers and ven­dors with the oppor­tu­nity to pay a fair price for their cof­fee. Unfortunately, this alone is not enough to ade­quately address the prob­lem of poverty for small-scale cof­fee farm­ers. There are, though, many efforts being made within the cof­fee indus­try to con­front this prob­lem. Yet chronic sea­sonal hunger, that is, hunger dur­ing the months when there is no income from cof­fee, remains a seri­ous problem.

If cof­fee farm­ers are to lib­er­ate them­selves from the cycle of poverty, they need not only to improve their yields, cof­fee qual­ity and pro­duc­tion sys­tems, but also to find ways to put food on the table year-round. This is where Coffee Kids comes in.

Coffee Kids was founded in 1988 as a non­profit devel­op­ment orga­ni­za­tion. Our work is not related to the pro­duc­tion or mar­ket­ing of cof­fee, but rather to cre­at­ing sus­tain­able alter­na­tives to cof­fee that will allow farm­ers to con­tinue to har­vest cof­fee, while sub­se­quently increas­ing their eco­nomic opportunities.

Dedicated to help­ing coffee-farming fam­i­lies improve their lives and liveli­hoods, Coffee Kids sup­ports pro­grams in food secu­rity, eco­nomic diver­si­fi­ca­tion, health care, edu­ca­tion and capac­ity building.

When coffee-farming fam­i­lies have addi­tional sources of income, they are bet­ter able to sup­port them­selves and their fam­i­lies. They can then con­tinue to farm cof­fee know­ing that a dip in inter­na­tional prices will not have a cat­a­strophic effect on fam­ily income.

Annually, Coffee Kids works with more than 9,000 cof­fee farm­ers and their fam­i­lies in more than 130 com­mu­ni­ties through­out Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras and Peru. The over­all impact of our 19 projects reaches more than 80,000 people.

One exam­ple is organic gar­den­ing in Tabaconas, Peru. Food pro­duc­tion in this region is scarce, and pur­chas­ing food is pro­hib­i­tive in cost. Thirty fam­i­lies are now learn­ing about native plants, the nutri­tional prop­er­ties of crops and how to sell their sur­plus veg­eta­bles. Not only are they now able to meet their nutri­tional needs, but they are also earn­ing extra income, which ben­e­fits all com­mu­nity mem­bers who can now pur­chase afford­able, locally grown and organic foods.

In the com­mu­nity of Nuevo Progreso, as in many other coffee-growing com­mu­ni­ties, peo­ple roast their cof­fee on a clay comal or griddle

Doña Graciela García reyes

Señora Carmen is the women’s group coör­di­na­tor for our pro­gram part­ner APROVAT in Tabaconas, Peru. Since 2005 she has been an exam­ple of out­stand­ing work and fierce commitment

Who Benefits From This Project?

Small-scale cof­fee farm­ers grow most of the world’s cof­fee on plots of land that are less than five acres. It is these farm­ers and their fam­i­lies who directly ben­e­fit from the sup­port of Coffee Kids projects.

Doña Graciela García Reyes, from Oaxaca, is a long-time par­tic­i­pant in Coffee Kids-funded projects. She has been fight­ing for women’s rights in the com­mu­nity since 2000, when she and three other women founded Naxii’, a women’s coöper­a­tive that pro­duces locally grown chili, peach and apple preserves.

Doña Graciela is cur­rently pres­i­dent of the orga­ni­za­tion Naxii’, runs an Internet café, and makes sure that the can­ning oper­a­tion, which is one of the organization’s biggest income gen­er­a­tors, runs smoothly. Doña Graciela also owns a small restau­rant and is cur­rently par­tic­i­pat­ing in CAMPO’s food-security project where she grows 10 dif­fer­ent types of veg­eta­bles in a greenhouse.

“I’ve been grow­ing veg­eta­bles since 2007 with the help of CAMPO,” says Doña Graciela. “We grow let­tuce, radishes, toma­toes and many vari­eties of chilies. In my house we eat very spicy food, and thanks to this project, I don’t buy chilies or toma­toes in the mar­ket any­more. I har­vested toma­toes all year round last year and had about 90 extra kilo­grams that I sold to fam­ily and friends. With the money I earned, I bought fer­til­izer for next year’s crop.

“Thanks to this project I’ve learned to grow my own veg­eta­bles, make extra money and get other women to grow the veg­eta­bles that they would oth­er­wise just buy in the market.”

How Can I Help?

Coffee Kids relies on cash dona­tions to imple­ment all of our projects. We also accept in-kind dona­tions in the form of pub­lic­ity, as well as equip­ment and other resources to help us meet our admin­is­tra­tive and mar­ket­ing needs.

Grounds for Health: Sustainability in our Mission, Health Care with a Lasting Impact

In recent years, sus­tain­abil­ity has been THE buzz­word in both the cof­fee indus­try and the pub­lic health sec­tor. At Grounds for Health, through 15 years of hands-on expe­ri­ence devel­op­ing health care pro­grams in some of the world’s poor­est and most remote areas, we have seen first-hand that too often, well-meaning devel­op­ment pro­grams are funded, set up, and run by out­siders, and then aban­doned with­out the nec­es­sary sup­port or train­ing to keep the project sus­tain­able. The third world is lit­er­ally lit­tered with inef­fec­tual pro­grams, bro­ken equip­ment and bro­ken promises.

Grounds for Health focuses on pre­vent­ing cer­vi­cal can­cer, the num­ber one cause of early death for women in most devel­op­ing coun­tries. The fact that thou­sands of women die from a pre­ventable dis­ease is truly stun­ning. It is also an eye-opening fact that cer­vi­cal can­cer is per­haps the eas­i­est of all can­cers to detect and to treat. Right now, the tech­nol­ogy and the resources are there to save lives and avoid the huge finan­cial and per­sonal bur­den that can­cer care and early death bring to fam­i­lies and soci­eties. So how does an orga­ni­za­tion begin to tackle this major health prob­lem skill­fully and effec­tively to reach a sus­tain­able solution?

Grounds for Health has dis­cov­ered a few key ingre­di­ents:
• Locally Driven: Communities must rec­og­nize the need, buy in to the pro­gram, and assume local own­er­ship.
Grounds for Health pro­grams always start with an invi­ta­tion from the com­mu­nity. The com­mu­nity has decided cer­vi­cal can­cer is a pri­or­ity prob­lem and is will­ing to put energy and resources into the solu­tion.
• Affordable: Local com­mu­ni­ties must be able to pay for their own resources and mate­ri­als to con­tinue indef­i­nitely.
In coun­tries such as Nicaragua or Tanzania where the annual fam­ily income can be as lit­tle as $300/year, any health care solu­tion needs to cost pen­nies and not dol­lars. The sim­ple screen­ing test Grounds for Health uses costs 25¢ per test and is con­sid­ered a “best buy in pub­lic health” by the World Health Organization.
• Focus: Programs should begin by reach­ing out to the pop­u­la­tions at great­est risk.
In rural areas, poor women between the ages of 30 and 50 are at great­est risk of devel­op­ing cer­vi­cal can­cer. By screen­ing and treat­ing this seg­ment first, soci­ety will receive the great­est ben­e­fit despite lim­ited resources. Grounds for Health’s close com­mu­nity links pro­vide the com­mu­nity edu­ca­tion and mobi­liza­tion that helps iden­tify and encour­age these women to go for ser­vices. The cof­fee co-op helps with trans­port and makes sure she gets follow-up care if she needs it. Without that link, she may never arrive for pre­ven­tion in the first place.
• Locally Sourced: When sup­plies run out, com­mu­ni­ties should be able to find new mate­ri­als locally.
Grounds for Health scru­ti­nizes every ingre­di­ent, sup­ply, and piece of equip­ment to make sure it is nec­es­sary, can be locally sourced when­ever pos­si­ble, and/or doesn’t require fancy tech­nol­ogy to keep it going.
• Locally Sustained: Programs should empower with the knowl­edge to con­tinue.
Grounds for Health invests heav­ily in train­ing local providers, thereby improv­ing health sys­tems, and increas­ing access to basic care. Local providers con­tinue the work and our co-op part­ners make sure that if there is a break in access either through loss of a local provider or a lack of nec­es­sary sup­plies, that efforts are made to cor­rect the prob­lem early. We are now focus­ing on edu­cat­ing mas­ter train­ers in rural com­mu­ni­ties who can help develop new providers and con­tinue to sup­port new pro­grams with­out our assistance.

And, the final key ingre­di­ent to sus­tain­abil­ity is the invest­ment at all lev­els of the fund­ing base. In the case of Grounds for Health, what runs our engine is the sus­tained sup­port from the Specialty Coffee Industry. Having a fund­ing base that truly cares about and is will­ing to invest in the pop­u­la­tion we serve means that the sup­port does not change when the next big cri­sis blows through the media. And because our fund­ing comes from many sources in the form of direct dona­tions, it means that there is no sin­gle fun­der dic­tat­ing our work. We have had the uncom­mon lux­ury of flex­i­bil­ity and free­dom to try out new ideas and to test what really works, change what does not, and make con­stant improve­ments to our model.

The result has been wide recog­ni­tion for out­stand­ing, sus­tain­able pro­grams that address cer­vi­cal can­cer pre­ven­tion – from com­mu­nity edu­ca­tion and mobi­liza­tions, to high qual­ity local health ser­vices, to assur­ance of care and fol­low up for women who need more. As part of that recog­ni­tion, Grounds for Health received the 2011 SCAA Sustainability Award, was named a National Demonstration Project by the Tanzanian and Nicaraguan Governments, and has been appointed to the World Health Organization’s Technical Advisory Group on Cervical Cancer.

What started 15 years ago with a few good peo­ple from the cof­fee indus­try join­ing together to address the high rate of cer­vi­cal can­cer in a small coffee-farming com­mu­nity in south­ern Mexico, has grown into a model of community-empowered sus­tain­able devel­op­ment. We are fully caffeinated.

Thank you Specialty Coffee.
To learn more about Grounds for Health or to donate, visit: www.groundsforhealth.org.

Ms Burns, Executive Director of Ground for Health, is an expert in women’s health and has worked in more than a dozen coun­tries. She is co-author of “Where Women Have No Doctor,” a health guide for women in low-resource set­tings, now trans­lated into over 30 lan­guages and used around the world.

The Expanding Market for Bird Friendly® Coffee

Bird Friendly® Coffee (BFC) is the world’s most strin­gent shade-grown stan­dard for cof­fee pro­duc­tion, requir­ing that cof­fee is both organ­i­cally grown and meets spe­cific shade-grown cri­te­ria devel­oped by the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center (SMBC) at the National Zoo in 1997 to pro­tect migra­tory song­birds. These birds are not only beau­ti­ful and sonorous, but are essen­tial to the global ecosys­tem, pro­vid­ing flower pol­li­na­tion and seed dis­per­sal, among other roles.

BFC car­ries a seal of approval (logo) that assures con­sumers that all the cof­fee in the bag is organic and has met the Bird Friendly stan­dards. The cri­te­ria include: a min­i­mum canopy height of 12 meters; a species list of at least 10 trees in addi­tion to the major or “back­bone” species; at least 40 per­cent foliage den­sity; and three strata or lay­ers of veg­e­ta­tion that pro­vide struc­tural diver­sity. Criteria apply to the cof­fee pro­duc­tion area itself and are con­sid­ered by indus­try and cer­ti­fi­ca­tion spe­cial­ists to be the strictest shade stan­dards in the world, ensur­ing a claim of “shade-grown” is true.

The ben­e­fits of Bird Friendly cof­fee production

In many trop­i­cal regions where migra­tory birds have over­win­tered for mil­lions of years, BF cof­fee pro­vides viable, qual­ity habi­tat in areas often dev­as­tated by defor­esta­tion. Of the more than 150 species of song­birds that migrate to the Neo-tropics (American trop­ics) each year, includ­ing ori­oles, tan­agers, war­blers and thrushes, many use these cer­ti­fied forest-like farms as their habi­tat dur­ing their months spent there. These farms also sup­port impor­tant res­i­dent birds like tou­cans, becards, wood creep­ers, and parrots.

Aside from the obvi­ous aes­thet­ics of their singing and strik­ing plumage, migra­tory birds pro­vide a num­ber of “eco­log­i­cal ser­vices.” They pol­li­nate flow­ers, dis­perse seeds, and feast on insects. In both SMBC and other stud­ies of birds in cof­fee, research has shown that they con­sume a wide vari­ety of insects, some of them cof­fee pests.

Growers cer­ti­fied to the BFC stan­dards nor­mally see price pre­mi­ums of 5 to 10 cents per pound in addi­tion to the pre­mium they already receive for being cer­ti­fied organic. The SMBC receives roy­alty pay­ments from roast­ers (more than $450,000 since 2000) that go to an SMBC fund used for research and edu­ca­tion related to migra­tory birds in gen­eral and the cof­fee con­nec­tion specifically.

The mar­ket for Bird Friendly coffee

According to a September, 2011 report by Dr. Robert Rice, coör­di­na­tor of the Bird Friendly pro­gram, approx­i­mately 1,400 pro­duc­ers man­aged more than 18,000 acres (7,600 hectares) of BFC area/coffee farms and pro­duced more than 9.7 mil­lion pounds of BFC in 2010, a 39 per­cent increase from 2009. Guatemala ranked first in terms of pro­duc­tion (with 28 per­cent of all BFC), and, with Peru (25 per­cent), Mexico (20 per­cent), Nicaragua (15 per­cent), and Columbia (8 per­cent), the five coun­tries account for 96 per­cent of all the BFC cer­ti­fied glob­ally. The remain­ing 4 per­cent came from Ecuador, El Salvador, Ethiopia, and Venezuela. Farms in Nicaragua brought that coun­try into the BFC pro­gram in 2010. Efforts are under­way to gain BFC in Africa, India, Indonesia, and the Philippines.

Sales of BFC rose 166 per­cent from about $1.5 mil­lion in 2005 when Japan entered the pro­gram to more than $4 mil­lion in 2010. Volume sold in 2010 was 466,000 pounds, up 3 per­cent from the 452,000 pounds moved in 2009, a reflec­tion of the gen­eral eco­nomic times. Projections for 2011 are on track to equal or slightly exceed the sales of 2010.

Roasters glob­ally are find­ing ready mar­kets for Bird Friendly® cof­fee among con­sumers with inter­ests in organic prod­ucts in gen­eral and cof­fee that serves as viable habi­tat for birds and other organ­isms in par­tic­u­lar. The vol­ume of BFC roasted and sold in the US between 2000 and 2010 increased more than 115-fold from fewer than 2,000 pounds to 225,000 pounds. The three years from 2007 to 2010 saw an aver­age of 25 per­cent annual increase in vol­ume roasted and sold in the North American mar­ket, a growth mir­rored glob­ally as well.

Today, there are 44 roast­ers in the U.S., Canada, The Netherlands and Japan that carry Bird Friendly® cof­fee imported by 16 com­pa­nies. Certifications are con­ducted by 13 U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)-accredited organic cer­ti­fi­ca­tion agencies.

Given the increased aware­ness of the impor­tance of pro­tect­ing migra­tory song­birds in addi­tion to farm­ers and the envi­ron­ment in gen­eral, as well as the inter­est of many roast­ers in get­ting dou­ble or triple cer­ti­fied to dif­fer­ent stan­dards that attract dif­fer­ent con­sumers, SMBC esti­mates that sales of Bird Friendly® cof­fee will con­tinue to grow into the future.

See www.si.edu/smbc for more information.

Sandra Marquardt is pres­i­dent of On the Mark Public Relations, which pro­vides media out­reach, event coör­di­na­tion, and research ser­vices on behalf of the organic food and fiber sec­tors. Dr. Robert Rice is the coör­di­na­tor of the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center’s Bird Friendly cof­fee pro­gram at the National Zoological Park in Washington, D.C.

Have the Spin Doctors Cured Us of “Sustainability?”.… The Core Conditions Persist

Our cof­fee import­ing busi­ness has been around long enough to have rid­den the com­modi­ties roller coaster over a cou­ple moun­tain tops. After pass­ing the peak in 1997, we rode the mar­ket down into the 2002 val­ley of death like the “charge of the light brigade.” Many small pro­duc­ers did not sur­vive, those work­ing with us in Mexico sur­vived because of our unique quality-based busi­ness model. After the most recent mar­ket peak last spring, it appears that we are fac­ing new chal­lenges; not only are the com­modi­ties being jos­tled by all the usual sus­pects, but now we also have major inter­na­tional bank­ing woes and seri­ously ris­ing costs of fuel and fer­til­izer. As these con­di­tions again stretch the sus­tain­abil­ity of cof­fee, our com­pany increas­ingly finds itself head­ing in the direc­tion of the intrin­sic sus­tain­abil­ity offered by a “Direct Trade” model.

One can learn a lot about sus­tain­abil­ity in gen­eral by enter­ing “The Politics of Sustainable Development, Susan Baker”1 into the Google® search win­dow to get an eye­ful. She shows that we’ve come a long way from the seem­ingly sim­ple con­cept where “sus­tain­abil­ity is improv­ing the qual­ity of human life while liv­ing within the car­ry­ing capac­ity of sup­port­ing eco-systems”2: we now have schol­arly works that inves­ti­gate the idea of sus­tain­abil­ity from all of its myr­iad envi­ron­men­tal, social, and eco­nomic aspects, as well from every polit­i­cal view­point. Is there spin? You bet!

To become more “sus­tain­able” in the cof­fee busi­ness we need to pro­mote alter­na­tives to com­modi­ties pric­ing for small cof­fee grow­ers. Why is this? It is because com­modi­ties pric­ing guar­an­tees the buyer the low­est pos­si­ble price based on avail­abil­ity, but unfor­tu­nately simul­ta­ne­ously guar­an­tees the seller a price that has noth­ing to do with his cost of pro­duc­tion. Although many large pro­duc­ers have the resources to “fly­wheel” over this short term “incon­sis­tency” in price as sup­ply and demand reach equi­lib­rium on a time-scale mea­sured in years, the small pro­duc­ers take the hit. Small pro­duc­ers are in the great major­ity world­wide and gen­er­ally have few resources and lit­tle access to mar­kets. They also have lit­tle access to credit or hedge accounts and need an alter­na­tive to sus­tain their liveli­hoods on a time-scale mea­sured in weeks.

Small pro­duc­ers rep­re­sent a very large pop­u­la­tion world­wide; in Mexico alone, 88% of the pro­duc­ers have less than 2 Ha in cof­fee (5 acres) acres in cof­fee and pro­duce about 55% of Mexico’s cof­fee . It is esti­mated that less than 25% of these small hold­ers have the oppor­tu­nity to hedge their cof­fee with con­tracts against the “C” market3. This means that about 40 % of the cof­fee pro­duced in Mexico (about 1.5 mil­lion 69 kg bags) is sold with­out pro­tec­tion from mar­ket volatility.

What’s more, notwith­stand­ing the few with pro­tec­tive hedges, it is esti­mated that the total amount of cof­fee sold against com­modi­ties pric­ing schemes is over 90% of Mexico’s production.4 “….Mission con­trol, we have a problem.”

I believe that we urgently need to seek and pro­mote strate­gies that con­sis­tently bring more money into cof­fee pro­duc­ing com­mu­ni­ties, simul­ta­ne­ously increas­ing access to credit, rais­ing the level of edu­ca­tion, and reduc­ing reliance on com­modi­ties pricing.

Judging by the increase in the num­ber of com­pa­nies now offer­ing “Direct Trade” cof­fee, many have reached sim­i­lar con­clu­sions. Direct Trade offers buy­ers an oppor­tu­nity to short cir­cuit com­modi­ties pric­ing and guar­an­tee pro­duc­ers enough money to cover their cost of pro­duc­tion along with a mod­est profit. For this to work, pro­duc­ers must be able to guar­an­tee buy­ers a con­sis­tent source of con­sis­tent qual­ity, fully trace­able cof­fee. It is this exact point where there exists the great­est ben­e­fit for both par­ties, because pro­duc­ers are forced to adopt prac­tices and process con­trols that per­mit them to make this promise.

It is our expe­ri­ence that with increased process lit­er­acy and with process con­trols in place, cof­fee auto­mat­i­cally becomes fully trace­able. The process ori­ented “cul­ture” that pro­duced the cof­fee, taken with the con­comi­tant doc­u­men­ta­tion trail makes it rel­a­tively easy for the pro­duc­ers to obtain nearly any certification.

We have found that the order and trans­parency that process con­trols force in to the sys­tem increase access to credit; bankers are much more likely to loan to those who can show where and how the money is being used; sim­ply said, there is much less risk all around.

Process con­trols force trans­parency and trace­abil­ity into the sys­tem at it’s base, e.g. between the cof­fee plan­ta­tions and the exporter. The rest of the route to roaster cus­tomers is already pretty well con­trolled. This is sig­nif­i­cant because it means that adop­tion of a Direct Trade com­mer­cial model does not change the route that cof­fee takes from pro­ducer to the con­sumer, it only forces process con­trols, trans­parency and trace­abil­ity into the entire chain, end to end. It is exactly this end-to-end trans­parency and trace­abil­ity that is con­sid­ered essen­tial for solid eco­nomic growth.

We have been suc­cess­fully using a Direct Trade model in Mexico for fif­teen years and have worked with our Mexican asso­ciates at Cafes Sustentables de Mexico, S.A. de C.V. to develop the FincaLab cof­fee qual­ity con­trol sys­tem. The FincaLab is a portable Laboratory with process con­trol soft­ware that pro­vides all the nec­es­sary con­trols and trans­parency, as well as prints bar­code labels with ser­ial num­bers on each bag that per­mit our cus­tomers to trace the cof­fee to it’s ori­gin at www.trackyourcoffee.com. Our expe­ri­ence has been that the increased earn­ings that result from our model taken with along with the FincaLab have allowed the pro­duc­ers to develop their coop­er­a­tives, build infra­struc­ture, and to gain the con­fi­dence to apply for their own pre-harvest financing.

We have been suc­cess­fully mak­ing cof­fee more sus­tain­able for our Mexican associates.

Jim is the Company founder. He estab­lished work­ing rela­tion­ships with Mexican coop­er­a­tives in Nayarit, intro­duc­ing a unique pro­gram of quality-based profit shar­ing. He guided com­pany devel­op­ment as a broad based dis­trib­u­tor of qual­ity cof­fees with an empha­sis on directly traded, exclu­sively mar­keted, and fully trace­able cof­fees from Nayarit, Mexico. He devel­oped the FincaLab, a portable lab­o­ra­tory and qual­ity man­age­ment sys­tem with pro­pri­etary soft­ware and a pro­pri­etary new, “hands off” pre­ci­sion sam­ple roaster, and a lab­o­ra­tory huller for cof­fee sam­ple prepa­ra­tion. The FincaLab is the core of a com­plete cof­fee process con­trol sys­tem that out­puts bar codes and ser­ial num­bers for all processed cof­fee that results full in Internet trace­abil­ity through www.trackyourcoffee.com.

Sources:
1 The Politics of sus­tain­able devel­op­ment: Theory, Policy and Practice within the European Union, Susan Baker (1997)
2 Caring for the Earth: A Strategy for Sustainable Living, Gland, Switzerland. (2009)
3 Silvia Guttierrez, AMECAFE, per­sonal com­mu­ni­ca­tion
4 Ing. Manuel Higuera, CONAYCAFE, per­sonal communication.