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café conciencia
Coffee with a Conscience
¨making
good on the promises of fair trade¨ |
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PARTNER COMMUNITIES
Café Conciencia´s Partner Communities are all worker-owned
agricultural cooperatives located in a temperate region that bridges
mountain highlands and coastal lowlands in the Department of
Quetzaltenango in southwestern Guatemala. The communities were selected because of their
demonstrated commitment to collective ownership and decision-making,
egalitarian distribution of resources, and organic agricultural
practices. They also were selected because each is already working
on roasted coffee, ecotourism, or other small business initiatives
that show great potential to thrive with Café Conciencia’s
investment of resources and technical assistance. Finally, each
shows a clear understanding of the need for the project and is eager
to work collaboratively to realize its long-term benefits.
LOMA LINDA 
In 1977, Father Celestino Gutierrez,
a Spanish-born Catholic priest working in the town
of El Palmar, collected funds to buy a piece of land called Loma
Linda in response to the exploitation he witnessed on coffee
plantations in the area. He
then turned it over to farming families, making it possible for them
to leave the plantations they had worked on for generations. The 74
original families of Loma Linda climbed steep paths to take
possession of the forest-covered piece of land at the top of a
mountain, and then worked collectively to build wood houses,
construct a road, and cultivate the land.
Today,
the Loma Linda Cooperative consists of 145 families (about 1,050
people in all). Their primary productive activity is the
cultivation, processing, and sale of organic, shade grown coffee.
Each year they export around 65,000 pounds of green (unroasted)
coffee to Europe under Fair Trade conditions.
Fourteen
women within the Loma Linda community purchase, process, roast,
grind, bag, and sell a portion of the community's coffee under the
brand name Mundo Verde (“Green World”). When they began in 1993 with
meager resources, the women roasted coffee over open flames or in a
bread oven, and had to mill and grind the coffee by hand. Despite
the progress they have made in collaboration with outside
NGO’s—acquiring good quality roasting machinery, developing handsome
packaging, and establishing a small sales network—the Mundo Verde
project has been failing. Their sales and profit volumes are low due
to limited access to urban centers, a lack of capital to invest in
green coffee, zero promotional materials, and poor pricing policies
and accounting practices. In the end, they work only a couple of
days per month in their workshop, and can afford to pay themselves
just $3.29 for a full day’s work. According to Rosa Maria, the
group’s treasurer, they would be in the workshop all week long if
given the opportunity.
What Café Conciencia has done for Loma Linda/Mundo
Verde:
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Granted
a low-interest, $4,000 microloan, allowing the women to finance
more raw coffee to roast throughout the year, enabling them to
increase sales and profits.
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Provided
office space in the city of Quetzaltenango, Guatemala where
coffee can be stored, distributed and sold more efficiently to
customers.
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Provided
assistance with sales and marketing, including new pricing
policies based on thorough market research.
What Café Conciencia would like to
accomplish with Loma Linda in the future:
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Help
finance new coffee roasting machinery.
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Provide
roaster trainings by skilled master roasters.
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Improve
the
quality of the coffee packaging.
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Increase
sales
both locally, nationally, and internationally.
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Contribute
in other ways to the Loma Linda community such as helping their
church choir obtain decent equipment and providing students in
their community schools with better supplies.
For more information on Mundo Verde Coffee,
click here.
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SANTA ANITA
 Santa
Anita was formed in 1998 by a group of ex-combatants who fought in the
36-year internal armed conflict that claimed the lives of over 200,000
Guatemalans. According to the Commission for Historical Clarification in
their report Guatemala, Memory of Silence, the Guatemalan State was
responsible for 93% of the violence, whose victims were 83% Mayan. After
Peace Accords were signed in December, 1996, Santa Anita became the
second group in the country to receive a loan from the Fondo de Tierras
(Land Fund) which was set up to help resettle displaced populations. The
community now consists of 32 families (around 180 people) -- Mayans from
several different regions of the country who speak four indigenous
languages in addition to Spanish.
The community spent its first year clearing the land, building houses,
and tapping local water sources. By their second year they had
constructed a schoolhouse and non-profit community pharmacy, installed
drainage and electrical systems, begun cultivation of organic coffee and
bananas, and applied for Fair Trade certification. From their 2004-2005
harvest, Santa Anita exported 31,000 pounds of organic, shade-grown
coffee. Despite their Fair Trade contract, workers still earn just $3.95
per day and live in cement-block houses with cardboard or scrap metal
covering windowpanes.
Santa Anita’s roasted coffee and ecotourism projects contain the potential to offer: 1) first-hand accounts
of the experiences of indigenous combatants, 2) information on
contemporary efforts to revitalize Mayan culture, 3) a picture of the
Fair Trade movement in the context of long-standing and ongoing
oppression of Guatemalan coffee workers, 4) hands-on experience of the
daily work of growing, picking, and processing organic coffee, and 5)
the taste of that coffee as roasted by the community itself.
Unfortunately, both efforts are floundering because of a lack of
financing, publicity, proper skills training for the workers, and the
full development of their tour programming.
What Café
Conciencia has done for Santa Anita:
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Granted
a low-interest, $4,000 microloan, allowing the Santa Anita coffee
roasting project to finance raw coffee and purchase essential
equipment.
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Provided
assistance with sales and distribution of roasted coffee within
Guatemala, and begun making contacts to be able to export more of
their coffee.
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Improved
the programming of their Community Ecotour project,
enabling them to generate new sources of income, while providing
educational, recreational, and volunteeer opportuinities to
international visitors.
What Café
Conciencia would like to accomplish with Santa Anita in the future:
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Provide
roaster trainings by skilled master roasters.
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Further
improve ecotour accomodations, food service, and
activities.
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Help
Santa Anita with their greatest need, access to clean water, through
project planning, fundraising, and implementation, to allow the
community to access a local water source to which they have already
been granted rights.
For more information on Café Santa Anita, click here.
For more information on Santa Anita Ecotours, click here.
NUEVA
ALIANZA
 For
four generations, workers at Nueva Alianza toiled in slavery-like
conditions under a plantation owner who profited from macadamia, coffee,
and other product sales. During the mid-1990’s crash in global coffee
prices, workers went 18 months without pay, filed suit against the
owner, and stayed in contact with one another while seeking work
elsewhere. Meanwhile, the owner declared bankruptcy, the plantation was
repossessed by the bank, and a brother of the owner attempted to take
over the land. On May 14, 2002, with help from two labor unions, Nueva
Alianza workers returned to occupy the plantation and forced
negotiations with the bank and the Guatemalan government. With a loan
from the Fondo de Tierras (Land Fund), a Guatemalan governmental
organization, they bought and received legal title to the land on
December 18, 2004. Their rare and dramatic triumph offers hope and
inspiration to working people all over the world.
The 40
families (about 250 people) of Nueva Alianza sold their first macadamia
and coffee harvests last year, enabling them to begin paying off their
loan, invest in their businesses, and pay themselves a wage of $3.29 per
day. They are beginning the long and costly processes of organic and
Fair Trade certification, a goal Café Conciencia is helping them to
achieve. Nueva Alianza is engaged in a number of exciting projects
including: bottling purified water from their natural springs, utilizing
alternative energies like bio-diesel and hydroelectricity, growing
avocados, raising pigs, and selling milk from their own dairy cows.
The
community’s eight-month old ecotourism project is thriving and shows
great potential to provide a steady source of income. Café Conciencia is
providing them with high-quality tour coordination, publicity materials
and promotional activities, training of community members, and
coordination of volunteer labor.
What Café Conciencia has done for Nueva
Alianza:
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Provided
high-quality tour coordination, publicity materials and promotional
activities.
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Trained
community
members and coordinated volunteer labor.
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Helped create
a Nueva
Alianza brand of roasted coffee and begun selling it locally.
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Assisted
with
sales and distribution of both Nueva Alianza coffee and macadamia
nuts.
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Generated
project
proposals and sought funding for several important community
projects.
What Café Conciencia would like to
accomplish with Nueva Alianza in the future:
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Help
finance
needed macadamia nut processing machinery.
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Develop
new
macadamia products such as oils and creams.
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Construct
needed
Daycare Facilities so that community children will be well-cared for
while their mothers are working in the fields.
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Replace
old
housing with new, decent and dignified housing facilities for
community members.
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