Catholic Relief Services (CRS) recently allocated $4.5 million in private funds to the Coffee Lands Program. It was a first for us — invest to specialize in a single value chain.
We chose to start the process of specialization with coffee.
Why coffee?
Because it turns out that a thriving coffee sector is good development — it fosters social stability and inclusion, economic prosperity and environmental sustainability in an era of accelerated climate change.
Coffee is one of the world’s preeminent smallholder cash crops.
More than 2 of every 3 pounds of coffee are produced by smallholder farmers.
The definition of “smallholder” varies, of course, from one country to the next.
For example, massive Brazil considers growers with up to 20 hectares (1 hectare = about 2.5 acres) to be small-scale producers while most growers in tiny Burundi and Rwanda tend “coffee gardens” with just a few hundred plants.
Our programming in the coffee sector has focused almost exclusively on farmers who cultivate less than five hectares, and often significantly less.
In the region of southern Colombia where we implemented the Borderlands project, the average area planted in coffee was 0.9 hectares.
In Eastern Congo, cooperatives measure the coffee holdings of members in plants, which often number less than 100.
Poverty is the norm
Farm workers gather the last remaining coffee beans being harvested at higher elevations in Matagalpa, Nicaragua.
Even for smallholder coffee growers whose farms are located in coveted coffee origins or whose cooperatives are competitive in international markets, poverty is the norm.
Research commissioned by Keurig Green Mountain and conducted by our partners at CIAT in Central America beginning in 2006 showed that even growers in long-term trading relationships whose coffee earned more as double-certified Fair Trade and organic were poor and hungry.
They suffered 6 – 8 month of economic hardship and reduced diets after the coffee income ran out.
Baseline data from our Borderlands project in Colombia tell a similar story: more than 60% of the growers in Nariño were living below the poverty line.
More than half reported food scarcity. A third said the “lean season” lasted three months or more.
Most coffee growers, in other words, are our kind of people—poor, vulnerable and marginalized. And globally there are more than 10 million smallholder growers.
Estimates suggest that 800,000 people in Ethiopia grow coffee, 800,000 in tiny Burundi, 560,000 in Colombia, another 500,000 in Centeral America and 400,000 in Rwanda.
Since so many of the countries producing coffee are coping with political and social upheaval, a thriving coffee sector is an important contributor to social stability around the world.
In Ethiopia, khat production and trading offers the promise of easier money than coffee, which requires a painstaking focus on quality and is increasingly under threat from climate change and related increases in pests and diseases.
In Central America, participation in transnational criminal enterprises that traffic in drugs, arms and people exerts a strong pull on young people in the coffeelands.
Many see bit roles in these underworld enterprises as more alluring than the hard work of coffee farming.
And in Colombia, coca is often intercropped with coffee, many times at the behest of armed actors, meaning that coffee growers must cope with the violence the drug trade invariably brings to their communities.
That’s what the farm owners face.
Farmworkers who depend on wages earned from the annual coffee harvest number in the tens of millions worldwide and represent the largest and most vulnerable group of coffee supply chain actors.
‘Hero crop’
A worker tends a coffee drying patio in El Salvador.
Given this context, coffee is generally the number-one licit livelihood option for smallholder growers and farmworkers — the leading contributor to both social stability and economic prosperity.
If the coffee sector were to collapse in any one of these countries, the economic and social fallout would be calamitous.
But coffee’s principal value may be environmental. Continue reading.