MCC Web Article

A visit to Las Colinas coffee cooperative

Supported in part by MCC, which promotes fair trade coffee through the MCC U.S. Coffee Project, six representatives from Goshen (Ind.) College were part of a recent delegation to El Salvador arranged by Equal Exchange, a fair trade coffee company. Rachel Lapp, public relations director for the college, was part of the group. See this week's News Service for an article on the trip. For more information about the MCC U.S. Coffee Project, which now includes dozens of congregations that purchase and serve fair trade coffee from Equal Exchange, go to MCC U.S. Coffee Project.

Julio Ascencio Garcia was glad to welcome us, glad to be inside the cool walls of an old hacienda house while taking a break from his duties on the sunny patio where he and his colleagues rake coffee beans still in husks café oro into piles to dry. His two sons sat on his knees as light from a long casement window silhouetted the coffee farmer. In welcoming our group, an interfaith delegation arranged by Equal Exchange, the largest fair trade coffee company in the United States, Garcia instinctively linked Christians in El Salvador and North America as partners in just trade practices.

In addition to you feeling at home I want you to feel like we are all part of one family, the family united in Christ, he said. I pray that God will move the hearts of the rich, the ones that He decided to make rich, so that they would understand our plight. Thanks to God, we have the privilege of being poor. And we are poor, but with a lot of faith, huge faith in God. He has made all the earth, all the land and all the sea and the sky. ... Right now maybe we cannot walk together side by side but perhaps someday we will walk together side by side in heaven. So I want to thank you all very much for being here.

Las Colinas is located near the town of Taculpa in the northwest department of Sonsonate, near the Guatemalan border. The one or two families who own a television cannot receive signals from TV stations in their own capitol, San Salvador: they hear more about political news in Guatemala than El Salvador during a highly charged election season where the new Salvadoran president will either support or protest international trade agreements that affect the farmers.

In the high-ceilinged room of the old house a coffee plantation before El Salvador’s civil war in the 1980s, run by rich landowners that paid workers 50 cents a day and two small meals of tortillas and beans a cooperative small-scale farmers now makes democratic decisions about how to sell their crop. They use the profits to pay off their land debt, maintain processing facilities and invest in community projects. Members of the cooperative range from administrators to machinery supervisors to bean pickers, but everyone in the community helps out during the harvest season, including women a number of whom are members and children.

A Las Colinas coffee-grower stands with feet planted at angles to the spindly tree that grows amid taller, hardier forest residents, and bends a branch toward him. With deft, quick fingers, he plucks the fruit as if picking out practiced notes on an instrument. His labor brings not a song but a basket of bright red coffee grapes colorful pulp that encases beans, which are actually seeds, that will dry to a green-gold color before they are roasted and brewed into a dark brown cup of café.

Grown at medium to high altitudes under shade trees, this is gourmet coffee among the best in El Salvador, according to a recent taste test by expert cuppers bound for North American through Equal Exchange, the largest U.S. fair trade coffee company. The Las Colinas beans will be roasted and packaged as the Café Salvador blend, which is also used in the Fellowship Blend sold to churches through denominational partnerships with Equal Exchange, including the Mennonite Central Committee-sponsored Coffee Project.

Members of the Las Colinas cooperative know that demand for their product is tied to its quality even more so than the just exchange of goods that comes with every pound when North Americans make the investment to buy beans. They carefully tend the coffee plants by clearing brush, annually pruning branches, fertilizing and controlling pests like coffee borers the latter being a full-time job when done using organic methods.

Thank you for your international support for our product, says Las Colinas farmer Pedro Antonio Ascencio. We are continually trying to improve our product.

(Rachel traveled to El Salvador as a reporter and co-leader of the Goshen College media team)

link to MCC article