Behind every bean that drops down the throat of your grinder there is a small-lot coffee farmer. Don Wilfredo Haslan is one such coffee farmer and our house espresso blend is named after him, our earliest (and enduring) inspiration to be committed to the fair trade movement. Wilfredo’s tiny five-hectare coffee farm is situated in… read more
Tadesse Meskela, for whom we named our second espresso blend, set up the Oromia Coffee Farmers Cooperative Union (OCFCU) in 1999 to try and make the international coffee trade work in the favour of local producers through higher, fairer and more consistent prices. The OCFCU has trading agreements through the fair trade system, making the… read more
Named for Sierra Madre, the epic mountain range that runs from Mexico right across Guatemala and into El Salvador and Honduras, Indigenas de la Sierra Madre de Motozintla (ISMAM) is the cooperative of Mayan coffee farmers in the Mexican region of Chiapas. These farmers, from more than 100 rural communities in Chiapas, have a deep,… read more
Guaya’b is a cooperative of indigenous coffee growers in Huehuetenango, a highland region of western Guatemala, near the Mexican border. The co-op comprises about 300 Maya-Quiché coffee farmers. Coffee is woven into the fabric of this beautiful mountainous region. Not only is it the primary export of the area, it is also largely to thank… read more
Ocamonte is a small municipality in Santander, a Colombian state about 300 kilometres north-east of the capital, Bogotá. Here, 270 coffee-growing families have grouped together and formed the cooperative Asociación Pequeños Caficultores de Ocamonte (APCO). In contrast to Mexico, Colombia doesn’t have a strong tradition of organic coffee growing, so only about half of the… read more
Small-lot coffee farmers, managing parcels of land around 1–5 hectares in size, have been around for hundreds of years, ever since colonial traders discovered that peasant farmers on a few hectares of land could efficiently produce coffee without expensive inputs and machinery. This became the standard method of extracting cash crops from these farmers who,… read more
Since market liberalisation in the 1970s, control of the world’s coffee stocks has been entirely in the hands of large international traders. Farmers have suffered from prolonged periods of prices below the cost of production – meaning little incentive (or means) to maintain their trees or develop their farms, let alone to keep themselves and… read more