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Learn what’s happening in the world of coffee and how it affects the farmers producing your daily cup.
I just wanted to throw this story out there. As if helping others wasn’t good enough on its own merits, there’s this (Helping Others Makes You Hot!) too.
Thanks to Janice for the tip!
I just read a great article from Popular Mechanics on appropriate technology, or the use of relatively low-tech solutions to solve common problems. For example, there has been a lot of work on creating an affordable laptop, but what would families do with a computer if they have no reliable access to fresh water? The article, “MIT’s Guru of Low-Tech Engineering Fixes the World on $2 a Day,” details a number of creative efforts to help families in developing countries generate energy, process food more efficiently and ensure a supply of clean fresh water.
A lot of these ideas are borne of a true understanding of the challenges faced by impoverished communities. Many people visit developing countries and have a gut reaction to what they see; they return home and try to address the problems without really understanding the needs or wants of the community.
Just like many of the efforts discussed in the article, Coffee Kids works to understand community needs and respects the ingenuity of the people we work with. They are the only ones who really understand what could help improve their quality of life.
Anyone who’s been around coffee for, say the last 10 years, is quite aware of the fair trade movement, which is why it surprised me to run into this article in BrandWeek, “Marketers Eye Fair Trade Certified As the New ‘Green’.” Fair trade is the next big trend?
It seems to be all everyone talks about. But I suppose that’s for folks in the industry. It’s interesting that paying a fair price to farmers should be some kind of market niche.
Reading the article, it seems organic is yesterday’s news, the green idea is hitting its stride and now fair trade will be the new in-thing for big businesses. But what it all boils down to is that unless farmers and their families have economic options outside of individual products like coffee, tea or chocolate, their problems will continue. It’s great to see the movement getting the attention of marketers and brand folks as more consumers demand it, but there’s a lot more to equal treatment than the bottom line.
The Christian Science Monitor had an interesting article on the food crisis and how families in Mexico City are confronting rising prices with backyard gardens. “Mexico City Launches Community Gardens”, provides more interesting stats on the food crisis that is affecting the world. Mexico has already put a freeze on the prices of food staples and now they are helping establish community gardens. 
As I watch my own humble garden grow, I realize that the power of growing your own food isn’t so much the nutrition as it is the satisfaction found in putting a seed in the ground and watching it emerge, grow and provide sustenance.
Many of our partners are working with coffee-farming families to help them create small organic gardens that provide healthy vegetables and fruits and help build economic independence and health. Our program staff made some great pictures of one program managed by our partner FomCafé in Oaxaca, Mexico. Check it out at our Flickr page. And our partner STIAP, who has been working in biodiesel, is beginning a permaculture/gardening project this year to provide food for their community in rural Guatemala.
I’m a little behind in posting this, but I was reminded of it again just the other day. In July, I posted a blog about the international food crisis and its effects on coffee-farming families we work with in Mexico (“Coffee Families Confront the International Food Crisis”). The Mexican government has stepped in to help regulate prices on basic commodities by putting a price freeze on 150 items, including tortillas, coffee and beans.
The article, “Mexico, Industry Agree to Freeze Prices on 150 Items,” at Bloomberg.com, looks at the effects of high inflation and a decrease in money being sent home by immigrants. According to the article, prices have increased 4.95 percent. Price increases are felt more acutely in the remote communities where coffee is produced. 
The author has a series of articles and also recently published a story looking into the effect of falling remittances (money sent home by immigrants) on the Mexican economy. The article cites a 2.2 percent drop in remittances for the first half of the year, which is the first decline in remittances since the government began tracking the data in 1995.
Anti-immigration forces may applaud the effectiveness of stopgap border patrol policies, but unfortunately this means that families in Mexico will suffer as people are shut off from reliable work and businesses in the US will be without labor as we enter the harvest season. And since we are entering the countdown to November elections, legislators will continue to avoid confronting the problem for fear of losing voters on both sides of the issue.
I found this story, “Chapel in Guatemala Testament to Civil War Horrors”, on the Web last Thursday. It caught my eye because a close friend of mine worked in the town profiled when we were in Peace Corps. While Zacualpa isn’t a coffee town, many coffee communities in Guatemala and other Latin American countries share a similar story.
The article talks about a chapel in Zacualpa that the army commandeered and turned into a torture/interrogation chamber during the 30-year civil war that plagued the country and left over 200,000 civilians dead. The war ended with the signing of peace accords in 1996, but the country still struggles with one of the highest murder rates in the Western hemisphere, weak law enforcement, rampant gang and drug activity, and mass emigration due to lack of jobs.
Every time I read an article like this I’m confronted by the harsh realities that many of the families we work with confront every day, the unimaginable atrocities and horrors that they witnessed. This story is part of a series of articles (“The New Immigrant”) that explore the immigration debate from both sides of the border.
As the price of gas climbs to $4 a gallon here in the United States, the rest of the world is transfixed with high food prices. While we are seeing higher food prices, it’s not quite what people in developing countries are confronting. A BBC article profiles six families from around the world in the article, “Families’ Shopping List.” According to one family in Guatemala (where Coffee Kids has four partners working in various communities), they spend almost half of their income on food.
The BBC has a variety of articles on the food crisis in the section, “Food Price Crisis.” The food crisis is creating problems for billions around the world.
Coffee Kids’ partners in various communities in Mexico (such as ICSUR in Chiapas and FomCafé and CAMPO near Oaxaca) are working to help diversify local crops and encourage family gardens bringing diversity to local markets and improving food security so that communities aren’t as dependent on outside sources for food.
Many are blaming the food crisis on efforts to encourage and subsidize the production of biofuels. While this is partially true, it merits more investigation. Land diverted to crops for fuel production takes available land out of food production. This is especially evident in the US where millions of acres of corn have been dedicated to producing the fuel inefficient corn-based ethanol that was touted as a savior for our energy woes. But producing corn-based ethanol still requires more energy than it produces. Coffee Kids’ partner STIAP, in the community of Nueva Alianza, has been working on their own biofuel reactor that uses waste oil to produce diesel to power the community. They have also been planting fallow land with rapeseed, an oil-dense seed that provides a favorable energy ratio. For more information on STIAP’s efforts, check out the cover story in our 2007 Summer Newsletter.
Coffee Kids was one of a few non-profits featured in the Santa Fe New Mexican article, Microlending: Bankers to the Poor, on Sunday, June 1. 
The story featured quotes from Coffee Kids Executive Director Carolyn Fairman and information on our partners AUGE in Veracruz, Mexico, and CECOCAFEN in Nicaragua, who are working in microlending. To learn more about these two groups, check out our program pages to read how our partners AUGE and CECOCAFEN are changing lives and fortunes.
A sidebar also featured additional information on us and the other featured non-profits.
As more countries dedicate resources to producing crops for biofuels, few have paid attention to the unintended consequences. A food crisis of staggering proportions is looming on the horizon. “U.N. expert: Food crisis ‘a silent tsunami’”, a recent article on CNN, talks about the problem. With more emphasis on foodstuffs for fuel production, prices for grains have gone up around the world.
The New York Times looked at food riots in Haiti in their article “Across Globe, Empty Bellies Bring Rising Anger.”
Many of Coffee Kids’ partners are working to help communities create their own sustainable food options. CAMPO has been promoting organic gardening, crop diversification and beekeeping among the communities they serve for years. Program participants working with ICSUR in Chiapas, Mexico, have been raising mushrooms and chickens. These options help the communities reduce their reliance on outside sources for food and also help create economically diverse communities.
This article in the Christian Science Monitor (“How to Ease the Squeeze on Food Access”), presents a variety of options for solving the food crisis, but some of the best options for countries that have the resources seem to be promoting ‘back to basics,’ locally-based agriculture.
All of us at Coffee Kids would like to extend our deepest sympathies to the family, friends and co-workers of David Williamson, managing director of Matthew Algie and dedicated Coffee Kid supporter, who passed away last week.
Williamson, a sixth-generation descendant of the founder of the 144-year-old coffee importer and roaster in Glasgow, was dedicated to Coffee Kids’ mission and a firm believer in helping create a more sustainable lifestyle for coffee-farming families.
Williamson was not only a supporter, but also a close friend and will be sorely missed by all at Coffee Kids.