unionroasted blog

Series about Direct Trade

My previous blog post introduced Pascale; she is studying the working and living conditions of some of the small holder coffee farmers that Union Hand-Roasted Coffee source from in Central America.  Here is Pascale’s next update of her work in Huehuetenanago.  This is a new relationship for Union;  now in our second year of sourcing from these producers, we want to identify the complexities the farmers face to enable us to determine what actions we can take to support them in the future.  (SM)

¡Hola!

 Everybody in the cooperative (and La Libertad) has been extremely helpful and friendly to me. I feel very welcome here. However, it is a distinct area they have their own rules which are important to respect. Therefore I prefer to stay close to the people of the cooperative since they know what to do and what not to do. However, this has several implications for the research:

It may influence amount of structured formal interviews that I can do; maybe not as many as planned. This is because everybody in the cooperative is extremely busy. The last harvest is coming in, contracts need to be made, the last coffee needs to be collected, people need to be paid. After this period there will be more time they assure me (semana santa, the period of rest, is coming).

 I know I must have a control group, although this is difficult for two reasons: First the speed in which I can work the questionnaire is slow. Therefore, I will first try to interview as many cooperative members as possible. Second, I prefer to stay within the area of cooperative members because it is safer and less risk when in remote rural areas.

Putting aside any negativity about these limitations, the cooperative is doing loads and loads of positive stuff. There is so much to write about. Iliana, the Manager of the Cooperative, is amazing; very smart, enthusiastic and full of energy to change and develop things.

I have started to perform formal interviews. I have spoken to several people and gathered a large amount of knowledge. I have collected coffee in Palmira and spoke briefly with the people there, I had a quick visit to ANACAFE (the Guatemala Coffee Board), I have cupped coffee in La Libertad and Huehuetenango, I have visited the export company where the coffee is prepared to be exported. Talked to some people of the cooperative and now know a lot the history of the cooperative. This has meant leaving the house at 7am and coming back at 9pm exhausted in the evening, so there has been until now little time to write down everything. But I am catching up with this now in the coming weeks.

The farmers are introduced to me “as the girl who is going to calculate what is a fair coffee price”. Although for me this is a very interesting and challenging assignment it is an extremely difficult and complicated job. Information on other areas of interest, such as I will therefore collect in a more qualitative way.  I really believe that it will help the cooperative if I can help calculate a fair coffee price for them. It is not easy to do but will be very worthwhile.

Saludos,

Pascale

 Pascales’ main work is to focus on the social conditions of farmers but the producers want to take full advantage of her background in development economics to create a business model.  I think it helps to be transparent and reveal the complexities that happen in the field. Producing coffee is hard work, not romance. And farmers’ livelihoods depend upon getting a good income.  These cooperatives in Northern Guatemala are in remote areas and life is about survival. Until Union started to work with them they had uncertainty from one season to the next. Through continuing our relationship, our vision is to bring stability and economic prosperity.

Next posts from Pascale will continue to talk about the importance of helping small scale farmers do business.

Steven

In my last blog post about Union Direct Trade I exlplained how we’ve developed a research project to examine the impact of our approach to coffee sourcing on the lives of coffee producers and on the quality of the coffee they grow. I can now let Pascale who is undertaking this research out in the field introduce herself and explain her thoughts when she arrived in Central America.

                ¡Hola!

 I am happy to introduce myself to all Union Hand Roasted Coffee Lovers. My name is Pascale Schuit, 24 years old. Currently I live in Huehuetenango, Guatemala but my home is in the Netherlands. I have finished my Bachelor and Master International Development Studies with the specialization rural economics (at Wageningen University, The Netherlands). After five years of formal education on development economics and sociology and previous field experience in Costa Rica with (coffee) farmers I am now going to work in Guatemala and Costa Rica for Union Hand Roasted.

                                  Steven, Don Nasario & Pascale – Tierra Altos, La Libertad

As you all might know Union Hand Roasted Coffee selects from farmers who produce high quality and pay a premium price for this quality. Moreover, they develop long term relationships with coffee producers that are committed to produce high quality coffee.

My first experiences here show that these two aspects, a fair price and the long-term relationship are very much appreciated by the farmers and are most likely to positively influence the quality of coffee. The fair price and the guarantee that Union hand Roasted Coffee will buy from them reduces the risk that farmers take when they invest in their coffee fields.

To illustrate, applying fertilizer is expensive and one is not always sure where the fertilizer will actually improve yields. When a farmer is not sure whether and at what price he can sell his coffee, as is the case when selling to intermediaries or coyotes as called in Latin America, the decision to apply fertilizer therefore includes a risk. It is a big expense and the pay-offs are uncertain. Union Hand Roasted Coffee has a contract with cooperatives with specifies the quantities and a minimum price therefore farmers know how much room they have to invest.

However, there are many questions to be answered. One of them is what is this fair-price? How much do farmers need in order to maintain and invest in not only their coffee fields but also in their family, education, health etc.? Where do farmers face problems in producing a high quality coffee? And where do the strengths lie to produce the excellent cup of coffee that we all like to enjoy?! This is just a small example of the things that I am hopefully going to find out during the course of my 5 months stay in Guatemala and Costa Rica.

I will regularly update you! But now I first will enjoy a delicious cup of Huehuetanango Highland Coffee!  

                   Saludos y un abrazo

                                Pascale

Any questions you’d like to ask Pascale about her research, please leave a comment below.

Last time I introduced our Union Direct Trade and what the benefits are from working this way with our coffee sourcing. In this follow up, I want to describe the steps we are taking to address one of the main weaknesses which is lack of accountability or verifiable claims that we make.

How do we tackle this weakness?

We realise that one of the main weakness of our Union Direct Trade, was that any claims we make about the benefits of our ethical sourcing are not verifiable. Essentially we are asking our customers to take us on trust. But I wanted to see how we could take a more transparent approach to support any views we express or indeed reveal short comings that we could learn from.  We’ve addressed this in a couple of different ways. Firstly we joined the Ethical Trading Initiative  (ETI) in 2003.  This organization is made up of three types of members:

        1) Trade Unions,

        2) Non-Governmental Organizations

        3) Companies. 

Even though Union Hand-Roasted Coffee, is the smallest company within the ETI organization, I have found it a useful experience that has provided access to established learning—particularly how to implement an Ethical Trade programme. It is from the ETI that we created our Union Code of Conduct for Ethical Sourcing. This document sets out our expectation of working conditions and labour standards at the farms we source from. We directly educate and inspect coffee producers against our criteria for labour standards. And as a trained Social Auditor, when I visit producers, I actively monitor working conditions of hired labour in farms and dry mills. If I observe poor conditions (non-compliances) at a farm, my approach is to engage in communication with the farm or cooperative managers to find solutions. It is far more productive to create a corrective action plan together, rather than stop working with this producer group.

This “auditing” methodology can be a beneficial approach to take with coffee estate farm managers where the enterprise is managed to good working practices. But with smallholder farmers it certainly has limitations because, from my experience, they organize their farm work in a less formal way. Frequently, smallholders have had a limited opportunity for formal education beyond primary level, and tend not to run their farm as a disciplined business enterprise but rely on (unpaid) family labour. So we have to be realistic about what can be achieved in the short term yet still have ambitious goals for the future. Can we accurately and openly determine the benefits of Union Direct Trade for coffee farmers, and communicate this with clarity and transparency.

So, to create a robust and formal mechanism to measure the impact of our purchasing practices, we worked with students studying for their Masters’ Programme at the Institute of Sustainable Development, University of Wageningen, The Netherlands. They created a monitoring and evaluation system to record details about the lives of the coffee farmers and their workers that we trade with. This is designed as a longitudinal study (over several years) and will be investigated in the countries where we have developed Union Direct Trade. Similar published academic studies of this nature have mostly been taken for a limited time period that gives a brief snapshot. This can be misleading when analysed in isolation. We hope our approach, by gathering information over several years, and looked at in a wide frame context, may be useful to determine the impact (good or bad) of our relationships with producers, as markets and other local or world events change.

This study may reveal complexities with our relationship with these coffee farmers, that we’re currently unaware of. We cannot claim we’ll have solutions to the problems we expose but the knowledge is power and underpins the value we place on transparency. Not only can we learn about the farmers and their working conditions, but we can analyse the impact of the trading practices we undertake.

In my next blog post I’ll introduce Pascale, a Masters graduate in economic development who is now in Guatemala gathering research data for the Union Direct Trade programme