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Press Release: November 6, 2005
From Vancouver to Peru, Women Lead a Coffee Revolution
by Jonathan Nelson
CHICLAYO, PERU –– On almost any other day, the Peruvian women who grow Café Femenino coffee would wear long pants, long-sleeved shirts, jackets and scarves to protect against mosquitoes.
This July day, about 100 of them wear yellow and purple dresses, floral print blouses, red tops matched to black skirts. Pink and red lipstick grace a few mouths.
The women, some of whom traveled 12 hours over a rutted single-lane road, gather in a lecture hall in Chiclayo, a coastal town of 500,000 where taxis swarm about, horns honking, like angry bees.
The farmers journeyed to Chiclayo to talk about Café Femenino, a blend of coffee grown exclusively by women. Spread across remote villages that dot the Andes Mountains of northern Peru, these women united two years ago to form their own coffee association as a way to earn more money, assert their independence and tear away a machismo yoke that has harnessed them for generations.
The enterprise is creating a cultural sea change throughout the Peruvian villages where Café Femenino is grown as men and women struggle to grasp rapidly changing gender roles.
In the midst of this revolution is Gay Smith, a Vancouver woman who flew more than 5,000 miles to talk to the Peruvian farmers about their accomplishments and future goals.
Smith, 59, and her husband, Garth Smith, 58, own Organic Products Trading Co., a coffee importing business based in Vancouver. For 14 years, the Smiths have worked with coffee cooperatives in countries such as Peru, Guatemala, Mexico, Costa Rica and Uganda.
Coffee is more than a source of income for the Smiths. The couple see the commodity as a tool to pull coffee farmers from impoverished lives.
The most successful Peruvian farmers within the 2,500-member cooperative that sells coffee to the Smiths earn about $1,400 a year. The group has parlayed that income into better roads, improved water systems and greater educational opportunities for their children.
More recently, a group of women within the cooperative wanted more control and formed the separate Café Femenino association. It made sense that the Smiths would be the sole brokers of that coffee, bringing the brew to cups in places such as Melbourne, Australia; Arcadia, Calif.; Guelph, Ontario; and here, in Clark County.
Just selling the coffee wasn’t enough for Gay Smith. She reduced her work at Organic Products and now is devoting most of her time to spreading the gospel of Café Femenino. It’s not just the Smiths who buy into the coffee-improving-life philosophy.
Coffee roasters who buy Café Femenino agree to give at least 2 percent of their gross sales revenue to the Café Femenino Foundation, which helps farmers in Peru and other coffee producing countries that sell beans to Organic Products. The roasters also have the option of giving the money to a local women’s crisis organization.
For example, a Bellingham agency that houses abused women and their children receives money from Moka Joe Coffee, a roaster and coffeehouse in the northwest Washington city.
This invisible link that binds women of different countries and cultures is tied to the estimated 25 million coffee producers worldwide. These people toil in a $70 billion global industry that until recently paid them historically low prices.
These are not workers on large plantations. Oxfam America, an international aid agency, reported that 70 percent of the world’s coffee is grown on farms of less than 25 acres. The majority of those farms are operated by families like the Café Femenino growers in Peru who own 2.5-acre to 12.5-acre parcels.
Oxfam and the World Bank are among groups that see fair trade coffee as an important tool to solving the coffee crisis triggered by over-production and greedy middlemen. Fair trade coffee, as monitored by organizations such as TransFair USA, ensures farmers are paid a price that covers their growing and harvesting costs and that the money goes directly to them, rather than an intermediary agent.
Vancouver’s Organic Products deals exclusively with organic and fair trade coffees, as do the companies that buy beans from the Smiths. Last year, the company generated
$6 million in revenue and imported 115,000 pounds of Café Femenino. This year’s crop has produced more than 300,000 pounds.
By comparison, Starbucks, the Seattle-based giant in the specialty coffee industry, bought 299 million pounds of coffee in 2004. Of that, only 1.6 percent was fair-trade certified.
Starbucks argues that helping farmers grow quality coffee is a more sustainable approach than simply joining a fair trade certification program. The company has developed its own training system to assist farmers in the production process.
Visit validates group’s existence
The fair trade issue is an especially effective marketing tool in the Pacific Northwest, where savvy consumers increasingly want to know the source of that morning jolt of java.
The stories behind the beans become as much a selling point as a primer for social conditions in Third World countries.
That’s why the Smiths spent 11 days in Peru in July traveling to the villages that grow Café Femenino. They made the journey with the owners of eight coffee roasting companies from the U.S., Canada and Australia. The visit validated the association’s existence in the eyes of its members while the roasters made personal connections to the Café Femenino story.
Gay Smith was a newcomer to the women’s association last year and delivered a speech that called its members “pioneers” and said they belong to a “sisterhood in coffee.”
Those words were like seeds sown in fertile ground. The women recruited more farmers, growing the association from 450 to 750 in 12 months.
The meeting in Chiclayo gave Smith the chance to reconnect with many of those women.
A heart for Café Femenino
Smith enters the community center and greets business partners based in Peru with hugs and kisses on the cheek. The lecture hall erupts with applause when Smith enters.
She smiles. The group settles. After introductions, Smith launches into a speech full of praise, guidance and, most importantly, hope.
“Just about a year ago, I stood before you and committed my heart to Café Femenino and to each of you,” Smith says through an interpreter. “I want to assure you all that has not changed and, in fact, my attachment and commitment has only grown stronger.”
They adjourn to another room for a more informal gathering, giving the farmers a chance to tell their stories. They stand, take the microphone and talk of personal independence.
“I wanted to say thank you very much to Gay,” Ricardia Delacruz Rojas says in Spanish. “Because now we don’t have to depend on our husbands. We can depend on ourselves.”
Smith pulls the glasses off her face and dabs at tears rolling down her cheeks. A year ago these women wouldn’t have had the confidence to speak in front of such a large gathering, Smith says.
Eventually she asks the question she regularly poses to herself: What more can I do to help you?
The answer, in part, came three days later when the Smiths and the coffee roasters boarded a bus and headed for the Lonya Grande region on the northern edge of the Amazon jungle.
The bus drove north from Chiclayo, crossed the Andes Mountains and dropped into a valley bisected by the Queromarca River. The group passed rice paddies, an oil refinery and clusters of homes and roadside diners. Clouds danced across the sky, casting odd shapes against mountainsides as if God was playing shadow puppets with the sun.
Switchback turns and shear drop-offs
The highway ended, replaced by a single-lane gravel road filled with ruts and rocks imbedded in the trail like land mines ready to crack the bus’ transmission or axle. The bus lumbered along the valley floor at 18 mph before it climbed into the Andes and traversed a seemingly endless series of switchback turns that revealed shear drop-offs.
At one point, Smith reminded everyone that the coffee they buy travels the same road.
The 16-hour journey ended in Nueva York just before midnight.
Smith awoke the next morning to clouds that cling to mountain peaks.
Nueva York, at 4,000-feet elevation, resembles many hillside towns in Peru where residents rely on coffee for their livelihood. Homes made of adobe brick line streets carved into the hills. The town’s main public square is a field surrounded by residences, a church with a whitewashed steeple and a one-room schoolhouse.
The square is the focal point this day as farmers from six different villages gather for a coffee festival. The Smiths and coffee roasters sit on a makeshift stage decorated with coffee branches tied to posts and a blend of cuymicuna and papelillo flowers sprinkled on the floor.
Flor Errera Colunche watches the singing and dancing from the field. The 42-year-old Café Femenino farmer, mother of four daughters, manages a one-acre plot of land.
The night before the meeting in Chiclayo, she penned a song that paid homage to Café Femenino.
“Vendiendo nuestro cafe a la esposa de Garth Smith,” Colunche sang a cappella at the meeting. “Arriba, arriba todas, arriba, arriba todas las mujeres con la cenesta y nuestro grabado muy tenpranito cosectz.”
“Selling our coffee to Garth Smith’s wife. Up, up all women, up, up all women with our baskets and our hook very early we go to harvest.”
Colunche, like so many women in the association, divides her days among housework, caring for domestic animals and working on her coffee farm. It’s a day that starts with the rising sun and ends late in the evening.
The festival gives everybody a break from the daily routine.
They watch children dance, dressed in costumes of hats stitched of llama hair, black shirts and cropped pants. Accents of red, green and pink gave the clothes a vibrancy that matches the energy of the youngsters.
Above the square, kids and adults crowd the balcony at the home of Oswaldo Gallardo Guevara and his wife, Alejandrina Delgado.
A Café Femenino calendar hangs from one wall. Strips of beef dangle from a rafter. A blue plastic tarp separates Guevara and Delgado’s room from the rest of the space they share with their five children. The pungent citrus scent of a freshly peeled orange clings to the air as the sound of flutes and drums from the festival drift through open windows. Guinea pigs and a white chicken pick at food on the floor.
Guevara, 54, rubs a towel over his black hair still wet from a shower he shares with several neighbors. A thin mustache covers his upper lip as he talks in Spanish about his support for Café Femenino. He likes the coffee because of the extra income it gives his family.
Delgado, 34, enters the room a few minutes later. Her shoulders slump inward and her eyes stare at the dirt floor.
She stands above her husband’s 5-foot-2-inch frame. Her black hair is pulled back into a ponytail. A few front teeth are missing. A reporter asks Delgado how she feels about Café Femenino. Delgado utters a few faint words before Guevara interrupts and finishes the sentence.
Another question to Delgado. She doesn’t try to answer. Guevara speaks for her.
A third question to Delgado. No response. An irritated Guevara tells an interpreter to ask him the questions, not his wife.
“How long does it take to walk to your farm?” Delgado is asked.
“One hour,” she says to the floor, her voice barely heard above the music.
Delgado lifts her head a little and pushes her shoulders back.
“I don’t get to the farm very frequently,” she says a little stronger.
Then Delgado tilts her head level with the interpreter. She stands upright and explains in a louder voice that her work is often interrupted by asthma and bronchitis attacks.
“It’s for this reason I cannot spend too much time on the farm,” Delgado says.
Guevara watches the exchange, his lips pursed tightly together.
Outside, music from the coffee celebration grows louder. In such a large group, the women talk easily and boldly of their newfound independence. Inside the home of Delgado and Guevara, such a declaration seems more problematic.
The tension between the genders and cooperative members is to be expected, Gay Smith said later. Human nature dictates some men will be more accepting to the change than others.
Smith does her best to dispel any notion that she is imparting her beliefs on Peruvian society. She sees her role as providing support and an avenue for change.
“It’s a democratic organization,” she said of the Café Femenino association. “How far do they want to go?”
Article found on The Columbian