Is your coffee building Trump’s wall? Part 5: How can we support marginalised coffee producers?

James Harper

Hey there, so this is the final episode of a five-part series.

If you haven't heard parts one to four, check them out before you listen to this.

I'm back at that gathering of farmers where we met Olga back in episode three.

Now, in the last episode we connected some dots.

The lack of economic opportunity for the majority of poor Salvadorans can be tied to today's immigration crisis.

In this episode, we're going to look at what the Salvadoran government is trying to do to help small farmers.

We'll get a glimpse into how wonky government policy translates to actions on the ground.

But most importantly, we're going to look at what we can do with our coffee dollars to support marginalized coffee producers.

But before all of that, I want to start with a story about water.

I'm James Harper and this is Filter Stories, the untold stories hidden in your cup of coffee.

So, it's the end of a long morning.

Everyone's had lunch, they're packing up, they cut the music.

One by one, farmers leave until I see this one man standing by himself.

My NGO contact introduces me.

Walter is an agricultural engineer and we quickly get out to this conversation about the environment and why it matters that El Salvador continues growing coffee.

James Harper

He tells me that coffee trees are vital for El Salvador because they trap rainwater.

Coffee trees make up to 40% of the forested lands in El Salvador.

Some areas get up to 4,000 milliliters of rain a year.

That's over 150 inches.

If El Salvador loses these coffee trees, all this rainwater will rush down in floods.

And they'll have to desalinate seawater, burning fossil fuels.

And the cost of water is going to rise.

James Harper

Now, I'm thinking to myself, if Salvadorans don't have access to cheap, clean water, that's one more reason to join a migrant caravan.

Walter thinks the solution is better government policy to conserve coffee lands.

But I retort, or we could just pay a financially sustainable price for our coffee, because it's the low prices that have pushed so many Salvadorans to give up growing coffee.

Walter agrees, and he says, if we can just pay $1.50 or even $2 per pound, people will start growing coffee again.

Water will stay cheap and clean, and people won't migrate as much.

And to offer a sustainable price to Salvadoran farmers, the cost to us in the global north is three to five cents per cup of coffee more.

Now, there are many organizations who are trying to keep coffee producers growing coffee in El Salvador.

For example, the government.

So I interviewed Hugo Hernandez.

He was the head of the government's coffee council, the agency tasked with supporting the coffee sector in El Salvador.

I mean, how much can you do?

I ask him, how are you going to keep the small, marginalized producers that we've heard from in this series from giving up when the coffee price is just so low?

Hugo is translated by one of his employees, Sara Cortez.

Hugo Hernandez

OK, so what we are looking for is to break these traditional systems.

For example, in the internal trade, the producers, in most of the cases, they give their product, their coffee, to big national or local companies, and these companies sell or export the coffee to higher prices.

And that differential price that sometimes is up from the New York stock market doesn't always reach the producer.

James Harper

Basically, the government is trying to help producers organize amongst themselves.

If they can move up the supply chain, maybe process their own coffee, sell directly to buyers, they will get more of our coffee dollars.

Speaker 5

This is the coffee.

James Harper

Now, what does this look like on the ground?

Let's rewind a bit.

I'm back at that gathering of farmers where I met Olga and Walter.

There, I also met Aquilino.

So Aquilino is the head of a cooperative.

His cooperative has about 30 members, half of them are women.

And as an aside, Aquilino has quite the story.

When he was 14, he joined the guerrillas during the Civil War and he fought against the government.

And today, he helps out with a community-run retirement home that houses up to 200 people abandoned by their families.

And Aquilino tells me a story I've heard a million times.

They're losing money with coffee.

And as part of their coping strategy, they're growing vegetables.

And something I did not expect.

They're farming tilapia fish.

Growing vegetables, fish farming.

These are great ways to earn some pocket money, put food on the table.

But in between the fish and the vegetables are all these coffee trees that are just losing money for him.

But Aquilino has a plan.

He's putting into practice what Hugo from the government just told us.

So the cooperative is processing its own coffee.

They're learning more about coffee.

They're learning how to sell it for a higher price.

They're forming alliances with other coffee cooperatives.

And ultimately, they're hoping to earn more money.

And I'm thinking to myself, you know, this all sounds great.

But I ask Aquilino, is this making a difference in how much you're earning today?

He says, listen, we've been doing this for a year.

Like we can't expect results overnight.

He says, there have been improvements.

But not financially speaking, because there's not much you can do when coffee is a dollar a pound.

The overall message was, things are tough, but we have a plan, we're motivated, and things are going to get better in the future.

As I walked around this gathering of farmers and listened to their stories, I could see how hard they were trying to stay in coffee.

And they will probably stick it out despite the low prices.

Because if they haven't given up already, they can continue to eat the food they grow on their own land and pray for coffee prices to get better.

But these people aren't the issue.

The younger generation, that's the challenge.

Because most of these coffee producers are in their 50s, their 60s.

In a decade or two, they may be too old to work.

And their kids don't want to get into coffee because it doesn't pay.

At the end of the day, it might come down to us and where we choose to spend our coffee dollars.

Because if we want the children of these marginalised farmers to stay in coffee and not migrate, maybe there's a way for our coffee dollars to reach them.

Now, you might be thinking, you don't want politics to get in the way when you buy a coffee.

But the thing is, all the food we buy is tied to politics, where it was grown, under what economic and social conditions, who in the chain is making money.

So, imagine we're back at that cafe from the first episode and we're staring at that wall of coffees.

How can we possibly tell who is a marginalised producer and who isn't?

The first thing I suggest is to find the name of the farmer on the bag, get your phone out and Google them.

If their website looks like a Disneyland brochure, you can be pretty certain they're not marginalised.

Okay, let's see, let's see, let's see.

Let's Google where my coffee came from.

La Cancia.

So, remember back in part one, that first coffee I bought in the cafe?

This is the thought process I went through to figure out whether the producer was marginalised or not.

They have a Facebook presence, so let's have a look at this.

Ah, there we go, website.

Site is broken.

Interesting.

The website link was broken, so I couldn't tell how glossy the website looked.

And so I went to their Facebook page instead.

I spent five minutes scrolling past photos of farm workers, this dog eating a blade of grass, a gorgeous panorama.

I guess this is the challenge, right?

How do you know?

How do you know who's marginalised and who isn't?

And I began to struggle answering this marginalisation question.

And as I was trying to figure this out, I kept thinking to myself, this is murky.

By checking a Facebook page, am I going about this in the right way?

Maybe I'm not.

But this is the best thing I can think of if I was stood in front of a wall of coffees in this cafe and I had five minutes to spare.

If you know of better ways, get in touch.

I mean, these trees look beautiful.

The English is perfect.

The photographs are professional.

They understand how to talk the language of the global north when it comes to marketing, what we look for.

I mean, these coffee chairs, this is like coffee porn.

And I think one way to approach marginalisation is to ask, well, could this coffee farmer work in America in a professional corporate white-collar career?

If he wasn't growing coffee, I get the impression this person will find other ways to make a living.

Yeah, I don't think this guy's marginalised.

That's it.

I've said it.

Not marginalised.

A delicious coffee.

I'm really enjoying it.

But next time, I probably wouldn't choose this coffee.

So we're back at the cafe.

And if you're still staring at that wall of coffees, unsure who's marginalised and who isn't, stop.

Look around you.

Is this the kind of roastery or cafe that prioritises marginalised coffee producers?

And sometimes it's hard to tell, because they might say in their website that they care about coffee producers.

They say they do direct trade, relationship coffee.

Maybe they support a school on the farm.

Okay, but for me, direct trade with a historically wealthy farmer is not as valuable as direct trade with a marginalised farmer.

And one way to figure out whether your roaster is supporting marginalised coffee farmers specifically, well, have a chat with the owner.

Rob Durrett

We interview these farmers.

I get also hours and hours of just audio recording on my, usually just on my cell phone.

James Harper

So I have found a roastery who buys all their coffee from marginalised producers.

When I was in El Salvador collecting these stories, I also went to Honduras, which is just across the border.

And it's there I met Robert Durrett, the man behind Farmer's First Coffee.

Now full disclosure, Rob offered me discounted room and board if I mentioned his coffee company in the credits of Filter Stories.

But what you're about to hear is my honest, critical opinion of his business.

Rob Durrett

Come on, like, what am I doing owning a micro brewery, a lodge and a coffee company?

James Harper

So when you have your conversation with your roaster, benchmark them to what Farmer's First Coffee is doing.

He partners with a small number of marginalised coffee producers in Honduras and Peru and sells the roasted coffee in the USA.

This is how Robert defines a marginalised coffee producer.

Rob Durrett

And so there is an institutional, generational challenge that these folks have to climb out of.

And in practice, this means the farmers that I partner with don't have access to credit, are dirt poor.

Most of them can't write their own names and most of them don't have titles to their land.

James Harper

Now, obviously, we're talking about Peru and Honduras, not El Salvador.

But the issue of marginalisation goes beyond the borders of El Salvador.

And in all cases, there are many recurring issues.

Marginalised farmers are very poor.

In Latin America, they may earn between $5 to $10 a day.

And they have to earn that $5 a day outside of coffee because right now coffee doesn't pay.

Meanwhile, their neighbours might come from historical wealth.

And if you come from wealth, it's much easier to access the specialty coffee markets and earn the kind of prices that keep a coffee farm in business.

In the case of El Salvador, a lot of historical wealth came from an unequal system and violence.

Honduras and Peru have different histories, but they also produced a class of marginalised, poorer coffee farmers.

Now, the second part of Farmer's First Coffee's business model, beyond just partnering with marginalised farmers, is Rob doesn't buy the very, very high quality coffees that poorer farmers struggle to both grow and sell.

He buys lower quality specialty coffee, the coffees that are easier for poorer farmers to produce.

And he pays a premium for those coffees.

And how much were they paid?

Rob Durrett

I wanted to take whatever the market price was and I wanted to pay a 50% bonus on top of that price.

So if you earn a dollar a pound, which is terrible, but that's what the market price was this year for many of our farmers, you get 50 cents bonus on top of that.

James Harper

And the prices Rob pays, they are higher than the average for those qualities of coffees.

But I wish Rob would disconnect the price he's paying the farmers from the commodity price.

Instead, he could pay $2 per pound direct to the farmer.

If a coffee farmer had $2 per pound in their hand, they would have a better chance sending their kids to school and investing in the farm.

So out of curiosity, why not just pay him two bucks?

Rob Durrett

Just flat.

So we've thought a lot about that.

We've thought about having a fixed price that we would pay all of our farmers.

But for the time being, there's a couple of different reasons why.

James Harper

Rob goes on to say that it's a startup and they have to prioritize profitability.

Rob Durrett

We are a business.

I have no shame in saying this.

We're not a non-profit.

He also says, Look, all these other roasters are selling the same quality of coffee at lower prices than us.

How do we stay competitive?

But there are market rates.

We operate in an open free market.

And it's difficult to go against that.

We're already doing it.

James Harper

Rob is facing a problem that many people in coffee who want to support marginalized farmers are up against.

How do you communicate everything we've discussed over this series to a coffee drinker who's there in a coffee shop staring at a wall of coffees?

And not only that, also persuading them to pay more for the coffee.

And we agreed that part of the solution is education and good storytelling.

Rob Durrett

Listen, not all five farmers we partner with are going to have these like world impacting, world changing background stories.

But they certainly have interesting things they can share with people.

And we need to do a much better job of articulating those things.

So, so yeah.

Anyway, yeah.

James Harper

I'd like to take a minute now and just reflect on my own personal journey in coffee.

Maybe you'll feel the same way.

So when I got into specialty coffee about 10 years ago, I fell in love with this idea that we could support struggling farmers in emerging economies and have a delicious cup of coffee to boot.

Back then, I thought my money was going towards the marginalized producers that we've heard from in this series.

Back then, the term specialty coffee for me captured this humanitarian focus and the fact the coffee tasted really good.

So my career progressed.

I worked for a big roaster in Australia.

I came to Berlin, managed the wholesale department for a specialty roaster.

And then I started Filter Stories about two years ago.

I traveled to coffee producing countries.

And I saw that the reality is, specialty coffee does keep coffee production alive.

But what I realized is that my money probably wasn't supporting the struggling farmer that I had in my mind.

So after two years, my definition of specialty coffee changed.

For me, specialty coffee does not mean humanitarian focus and delicious coffee.

It just means delicious coffee.

I'm not sure what we call coffee, though, that's sourced with a humanitarian focus.

Ethical coffee?

Conscious coffee?

I don't know.

I'm sure you can think of a better name.

If you know a roaster that supports marginalized farmers exclusively, tell me.

Hello at filterstories.org.

What I'll do is put all these roasters together in a list.

So when we want to buy coffee with a humanitarian focus, we know where to go and we can start spending our coffee dollars differently.

For listening.

So this series, as well as all the filter stories, is recorded, produced, and edited by me.

I also write and perform the piano music.

I want to give a huge shout out to Domentially for sound mixing the whole series.

If you like what you heard, and you would like this kind of sound quality for your own projects, you can contact Domentially by going to domentiallysound.com.

There are so many people to thank for this series, and I've written them all in the episode credits.

This couldn't have been done without their help.

And you know who you are, so thank you so much.

I am planning to create a little bonus episode for you.

It's going to be the story of Alvador Zafano, you know, our economist.

It's a smaller story, but it's very personal, and adds another layer of context to everything that we've just heard these past five episodes.

This filter stories logo was designed by Headquarters, which is a packaging and branding design team.

You can find more of their work at headquarters.studio. And finally, if you enjoyed this series, please share it with your friends, and also write a review on Apple podcast.

These are the two and really only ways of growing this little independent podcast.

If you have thoughts around marginalization, where this show should go in the future, please reach out to me at hello at filterstories.org.

Thank you so much for your support and your time.

Until next time.