Jolie Rouge

[Community aims to perk up business for small farmers

[size=1]By SARAH ANDERSON
Special to The Advocate [/i][/b]

http://www.2theadvocate.com/stories/...s_biz001.shtml

Julienne Mukankundiye, whose coffee farmer husband was killed in the 1994 genocide of 800,000 Rwandans, sorts coffee beans in the small east African country where Community Coffee Co. participates in a fair trade program to improve the livelihood of farmers.
When Julienne Mukankundiye's husband was killed in the 1994 genocide of about 800,000 Rwandans, she was left with eight broken children and a dying crop.
Without the means to care for the 1,200 coffee trees her husband left behind, Mukankundiye, now in her 60s, struggled to pick up the pieces of her life.

"I tried to find a job but could not," said Mukankundiye, whose comments were translated from French and relayed by e-mail.

"Lots of kids were just left on the hills with their parents killed. Life was too bad, and I had to ask people to help me."

Mukankundiye adopted three orphans after the machete massacres subsided but could not afford to send them or her own five children to school.

Her coffee trees, once a valuable commodity to the family, withered untended in the hills of the small east African country.

But now her field is on the mend. Two hundred of her trees are harvested for their ripe red cherries, the fruit that encases green coffee beans. Mukankundiye is getting a significant return on her crop, and several of her children are in school.

Baton Rouge-based Community Coffee Co. had a hand in the resuscitation of Mukankundiye's farm and is buzzing about its efforts to improve the lives of once-impoverished farmers through its participation in a fair trade trend that has taken hold among trendy companies on the East and West coasts.

Community has joined forces with cooperatives in Rwanda, Colombia and Mexico to help small farmers, who have been crushed by record-low coffee prices.

Community's small but growing fair trade program ensures producers premium prices for their high-quality beans, officials say.

"We have a long-term interest in making sure that farm families are able to earn a fair price for their product, so that they can reinvest in their family, in their farm and in their community," said Community Chief Executive Officer Randy Russ.

On the glutted coffee market, prices have hovered at devastating lows since Vietnam flooded the market with cheap, poor-quality beans in the late 1980s. The price of a cup of Joe may be boiling over in trendy gourmet shops, but many farmers of the world's second most heavily traded commodity after oil can't break even, much less turn a profit on their beans.

Instead of the 50- or 60-cent market price, companies that tout fairly traded coffee pay at least $1.26 per pound, which is the base rate for fair trade beans. When the market price rises above that floor, they pitch in an extra 5 cents.

Last year, Community paid $1.36 a pound for 18 tons of specialty beans from Rwanda, its newest fair trade partner. The company bought more than 100 tons at similar prices from farmers in Mexico and Colombia, where the company's presence has been strong for the last four years.

Before signing contracts with any of the producers, Community representatives taste-test the java to filter out any unsuitable varieties. If they like what they taste, Russ said they visit the farmers and learn more about them so the two groups can forge direct relationships and offer a consistent product that brews a little karma in with that early-morning caffeine kick.

At less than 2 cents more than a regular cup of coffee, the increased price of fair trade coffee is "marginal in terms of the impact," Russ said.

Co-ops such as Abahuzamugambi, a klatch of about 1,500 Rwandan farmers, many of them widows of the genocide, provide agricultural education programs, facilities for washing and processing beans and credit to farmers to help them get on their feet.

And Community does more than simply pay extra cash to the producers. In Colombia, the company helped build a community center and school, said Luis Samper, former president of the Colombian Coffee Federation, a klatch of 500,000 coffee farmers.

Community also is considering fronting a reforestation program in Rwanda, where unregulated clearing and grazing have exposed the land to severe erosion.

Fair trade beans are just a demitasse of Community's output, but the company is looking to expand the market. Russ declined to give current or projected figures, but said it is a "growing fraction" of the company's business.

In late July, Community hosted representatives from TransFair USA, an Oakland, Calif.-based group that certifies and promotes fair trade coffees, teas and chocolates.

"It gives us great hope to meet pioneers in the industry who understand what needs to be done," said TransFair spokeswoman Haven Bourque, who met with Russ and other Community executives to discuss the company's possible use of the Fair Trade Certified label.

The fair trade movement has been pushed forward largely by student and religious groups, so seeing a company offer the product ahead of consumer demand is refreshing, Bourque said.

But demand for fairly traded beans should percolate when customers hear farmers' stories and realize how easy it is to make a difference, Bourque predicted.

"We wake up with a cup of coffee every morning," she said. "But how deeply do we think about the hands that produce the beans? This is a small effort to make for an amazingly delicious cup of coffee."

Russ agreed that the East and West Coast trends of sipping socially responsible beans will permeate the South soon enough.

And Timothy Schilling, director of a U.S. Agency for International Development-sponsored program aimed at beefing up Rwanda's agricultural output, said fair trade is on the cusp of breaking big in the states as more American buyers inquire about international partners.

While fair trade prices for every producer may be improbable, the difference is "earthshaking" for farmers like Mukankundiye, who have traded tattered dresses for new clothes, shoes and jewelry, Schilling wrote in her e-mail from Rwanda.

"It's a real rags to riches story," Schilling said. "In the hills, houses have new roofs, some growers have purchased cows, many more children go to school, and there are smiles where there used to be despair."

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