APECAFORM’s name tells you a lot about the organization’s members. APECAFORM is the Maya-Mam Association of Smallholder Organic Coffee Farmers. Its 472 members are Maya indigenous people who speak predominantly Mam, one of more than 20 languages spoken in Guatemala. They are also smallholder coffee farmers committed to organic shade farming. What the name doesn’t […]
Santa Adelaida has been committed to principles of environmental sustainability since it began growing shade coffee in 1980. So when a local NGO suggested in 1992 that the organization’s members begin farming organically, it was a vision closely aligned with Santa Adelaida’s own. That year, its members began the transition to organic farming practices with […]
The Santa Anita Coffee Producers Association is comprised of 117 revolutionary ex-combatants in Guatemala’s civil war. They laid down their arms in 1996 as part of the Peace Agreements, but they have never stopped talking about revolution. For decades, they sacrificed to achieve their vision of equality and justice in all of Guatemala. In 1998, […]
The 5 de junio cooperative sees organic specialty coffee as the key to the development of its communities. Its confidence in this vision reflects its belief that its coffee embodies the best its communities have to offer, from the terroir of a coffee origin emerging as one of Nicaragua’s finest, to the generosity, hard work […]
The El Salto cooperative in El Salvador is named for a dramatic waterfall – or “salto de agua” – just a short distance from its offices that sends water tumbling more than 60 meters over a sheer rock face. It is one of five waterfalls on the farm that the cooperative’s members manage collectively, so […]
I am writing this post from the coffeelands in El Salvador, where many of the cooperatives we accompany made the ill-advised decision to fix the prices in their coffee contracts for the 2010/11 cycle as early as last September. Contracts fixed then at $2-$2.25 a pound were cause for celebration — in some cases these […]
With apologies to Monty Python (and to anyone who might object to reading here about something other than coffee): today’s post is about cacao. Not just any cacao, but cacao fino de aroma from Ecuador, one of the world’s finest varietals. I recently visited the Ecuadoran Amazon, where we will soon be starting the Borderlands […]
