September 10th, 2009
Chris Treter

What happens when you put 40 Nicaraguan coffee farmers, 3 representatives from an international development organization, and three coffee roasters/ importers into the same room for 10 hours a day over 4 straight days in an isolated locale? Here in the mountains of Nicaragua you'll find representatives from every step of the coffee chain working together to hash out the struggles and successes, advances and stumbling blocks to finding a fair price for coffee growers throughout the country. We've traveled down a dirt road, past a washed out bridge, through a river bed, and up the mountainside on the outskirts of Matagalpa to participate in this retreat.

Matagalpa, a small coffee driven town with over 400,000 residents, is surrounded by mountains that produce some of the best coffee in the country. Nicaragua is an ideal country to have such a retreat. Just 8 years ago, at the height of the coffee crisis, thousands of coffee growers were abandoning their fields due to the horribly low price of coffee and living in the streets of Matagalpa and Managua. Many trees in their fields today are over 20 years old, producing a fraction of their potential.

According to the World Bank, 48% of the country's population live below the poverty line. Nearly 200,000 people work in the coffee sector in the country. While over 80% of Nicaraguan coffee grows above 600 meters, qualifying it for “strictly high grown” status, (a criteria for quality coffee) only 10-15% of Nicaraguan coffee is sold as a differentiated product, with a premium price. Of the nearly 140,000 bags that would qualify on an average year for a premium price, Nicaragua only sells 24000 bags per year as Fair Trade coffee and 10,000 bags certified "organic."

As part of Cafe Livelihood, a Catholic Relief Services program geared toward increasing coffee production and cooperative commercialization in 4 Central American countries, I've joined Tripp Pomeroy from Cafe Campesino and Bill Harris from Cooperative Coffees to lead workshops on Commercialization and Managing Risk in the coffee fields. Such topics are the cornerstone to creating fair trading relationships between small-scale growers and importers/roasters in the United States through the cooperative infrastructure in order to ensure higher prices for coffee growers. While many coffee growers throughout the world do not have the education, capital, nor infrastructure adequate to meet the demands of exporting hundreds of thousands of dollars worth coffee each year, retreats like this are essential to provide the tools necessary for such a large task. It also provides roasters like myself inspiration from and insight into the challenges facing coffee growers today.

To ensure that small-scale coffee growers produce the highest quality coffee and receive the largest return on their beans, growers must take back the coffee chain. Primary co-ops, secondary co-ops, secondary exporting co-ops, along with our importing co-op, Cooperative Coffees, and coffee roasters Cafe Campesino and Higher Grounds are doing just that - all present in the room representing each link in the chain from crop to cup. Investigating organic production, fair trade certification, managing risk, commercialization and contract practices are all geared toward maximizing the return for producers.

Central to it all is strengthening the cooperative structure to combat the large transnationals driven by purchasing coffee at the cheapest price possible. Vicente Colindres, a middle aged coffee farmer from the La Union Cooperative wrapped up the feeling of the retreat just right, "You could never learn in the university the importance of cooperativism. You have to just live it." Here, as we work together to promote organics and a better price paid to the grower in a sustainable and cooperative way we are doing just that.