Living in Peru : your everyday companion

On the edge of southeast Peru’s Andes Mountains, descendants of the ancient Aymara and Quechua civilizations have built an unlikely international coffee trade from one of the most remote corners of the world. Just to get their produce to the port of Lima for dry milling takes a treacherous three-day journey—including up to eight hours by foot from their mountainside farms. Even so, last year the 4,500 small-farm families of CECOVASA, a federation of eight production cooperatives, sold a record 7.9 million pounds of green coffee to a dozen different buyers around the world. For three years, Starbucks has been one of the largest supporters and purchasers, particularly of premium-priced Fair Trade.


Over decades, however, the Aymara and Quechua’s harsh treatment of the land and pollution of rivers has depleted much of the highland soil and threatened the fragile Tambopata River watershed, one of the world’s most diverse ecosystems. Since 1998, the environmental nonprofit Conservation International, with support from Starbucks and others, has helped CECOVASA teach farmers to curtail the most destructive practices, such as clear-cutting large tracts of virgin forest for new planting.


CI gets their cooperation by helping to certify their crops for higher-priced organic coffee, and by teaching anti-erosion and other techniques that increase yields and quality, and thus income. “Sustainability is the key,” says CI Peru director Luis Espinel. “We have to make more farmers viable where they are so they won’t have the need to expand further.”


CECOVASA is one of the Fair Trade movement’s success stories. The international marketing system sets floor prices for small farms, which have run up to 75% above rock-bottom market rates of the last five years. The coops’ technical assistance to growers, guided by CI, has been funded largely out Fair Trade premiums. Starbucks is not just CECOVASA’s biggest buyer of Fair Trade, but also has consistently paid a premium above the already-elevated floor prices as an incentive for the coops to continue their quality and conservation efforts under CI. The lion’s share of every sales dollar, roughly 85-90%, goes directly to growers. The rest, after covering the coops’ costs, has gone mostly to improving quality in recent years.

With Fair Trade, organic certification and higher quality bringing in more income, many families have not only survived the recent market crisis, but have also made many improvements to their living and social conditions. Some are sending children to college for the first time, and many are upgrading their farms—with running water in kitchens, generators to provide electricity, new shelters to improve coffee drying, and waste filtration tanks to prevent contamination of soil and water.

Still, further progress is not guaranteed. More than half of CECOVASA’s 4,500 members are not yet participating in the CI program. Another 2,000 area farmers outside of CECOVASA, plus unchecked migration from nearby Bolivia, continue to imperil the fragile environment. Says Espinel: “The advance has been contained, but the threat is not over.”

tags : peruvian coffee

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