Specialty Coffee Retailer is a publication for owners, managers and employees of retail outlets that sell specialty coffee. Its scope includes best sales practices, supplies, business trends and anything else to assist the small coffee retailer.
Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/96901
Direct benefit The Farm Direct model is emerging as an alternative for ensuring fair payment to coffee farmers. BY PAN DE METRAKAKES C offee farmers have been on the minds of American coffee drinkers even before Juan Valdez and his donkey strolled onto America's TV screens. Coffee is a product of the Third World, where farmers of all kinds have been chronically mistreated and underpaid. Socially conscious coffee drinkers—the kind who are especially likely to visit coffeehouses—care about that, which is the raison d'être of approaches like Fair Trade. The Fair Trade concept, long a subject of intense debate, has been roiled by last year's departure of Fair Trade USA from Fairtrade International. (See "How fair is fair trade?" on page 10.) Some roasters and coffeehouses are taking concern for coffee farmers to what they see as the next logical level: Building direct links between farm and cup. This concept, generally known as "Farm Direct," is based on relationships between individual farmers or farming towns and roasters—and beyond the roasters, the coffeehouses they supply. Under the Farm Direct model, not only do roasters commit to buying all or most of the crop from the targeted farmers; they seek to maximize payments to them by cutting out middlemen as much as possible. This means that the roasters, or their agents, do the exporting themselves at cost, along with the production tasks that precede it: depulping, washing, hauling, etc. DRAMATIC BENEFITS The benefits for farmers are dramatic, according to Farm Direct advocates like Ed Wethli, owner of Kiva Han Coffee, a roaster based in Cranberry Township, Pa. In a lecture at this year's SCAA Expo in Portland, Ore., Wethli claimed that Farm Direct can net coffee farmers as much as $1 a pound more than the Fair Trade price. "What [Farm Direct] really is, is going to smaller farmers and helping them, buying their coffee directly and taking it to the mill with them or for them," Wethli says. "Once we take it off their hands it becomes our responsibility. You've got to find a roaster that is willing to commit to that. There really aren't a lot of us out there doing this." Salvadoran coffee farmer Nancy Majano Arenivar stands in front of the El Salvador "Origin Week" display at Ritual Roasters in San Francisco. Finding those roasters isn't as simple as looking for a seal on a package. There is no agency or organization that certifies coffee as "Farm Direct." Coffeehouse operators who are interested in Farm Direct coffee must seek out roasters who are following Farm Direct principles. The most basic requirement is, simply, a "story"—a narrative about the farmer or farmers involved, giving the nature and history of the relationship and its benefits to them. "When you do this Farm Direct coffee, you want to build a long-term relationship with these farmers," Wethli said in the SCAA lecture. "You don't want to just go in there once, buy their crop and then leave." AMAZON ANDES Kiva Han has developed such a relationship with the farmers of Cococho, Peru, a town 7,200 feet above sea level in the "Amazon Andes." It is 17.5 hours from the nearest airport, with the last five hours on a hazardous one-lane dirt road. The farmers there had been selling their crop to middlemen, often known as "coyotes," who often cheated them every way they could. The coyotes would weigh the coffee with scales that registered up to 20 percent short; they would use satellite Internet connections, which they knew the farmers didn't have, to take advantage of fluctuations in the commodity price, which Wethli says cheated the farmers by up to 50 percent. 13