All Posts (1817)
Sort by
I just spent two weeks in southern Mexico working on a project to teach coffee farmers how to keep bees with help from Jose Luis Zarate and Jose Carlos Vargas in Coffee Kids’ Oaxaca office. The beekeeping project has grown parallel to and integrated into Coffee Kids work.For three years I have been picking at the idea of visiting Coffee Kids partners CECOCAFEN in Nicaragua, CAMPO and FomCafe in Oaxaca, as well as other cooperatives in Chiapas. This year Professor Dewey Caron, a leading beekeeping scientist with 40 years of teaching experience here and in Latin America, accompanied me. Among his books is one on killer bees.Dewey and I are building a three-part manual of best practices in beekeeping for coffee cooperatives that already produce honey or are thinking about it.After a long tradition as a natural sweetener in Central America, honey production went into steep decline when killer bees swept through the region in the 1980’s destroying all traditional beekeeping methods. In the last 15-20 years pent-up demand and a readiness to adopt modern methods have brought honey back, partly as a popular local sweetener, but more importantly as a source of supplemental income for those dependent upon coffee’s wildly fluctuating world prices.
The manual we created has three parts in a Q-and-A format. Part one deals with technical matters, such as production of one’s own equipment or handling queen bees. The second section covers organizational matters, such as cooperative governance, the role of the executive director and the distribution of money among members. The final section treats the marketing of the honey. For example, how does the cooperative “brand” its products? How do they spread their efforts between local, national and international markets?In our discussions with managers and farmers we confirmed several of our pre-conceptions and made several counter-intuitive discoveries. In the first category, none of the beekeepers was a “hobbyist” as is widely the case in U.S; all wanted to produce honey for additional income. In the second, some cooperatives chose not to try to sell honey for the highest (Fair Trade, organic) prices, because they were able to sell everything they produced at the local level.One of the beekeeping heroes we met was Alfredo Contreras, a second-generation beekeeper with CAMPO. With an extraordinary “hive-side manner,” Contreras is passionate about teaching and about including women, long marginalized from primary economic activities.What made this project particularly fulfilling was that we were not two gringos bringing tablets of wisdom and experience from afar, but rather gatherers of information learning and sharing knowledge with other experience beekeepers. Like collectors of folk music we “recorded” what we found and then let others share the results.
During our stay, we met with various cooperatives in the provinces of San Igancio and Jaen, in the northern department of Cajamarca. According to national and UN statistics poverty in these areas affects 75% of the population.In the communities of Tamborapa Pueblo, Tabaconas and Rodeopampa, we met with coffee producers and their families. Most of the families depend largely on coffee as their main source of income. One of the families we met told us that a family of five needs at least 50 dollars a week for food, which doesn’t seem like much to many of the people reading this. But to families living below the poverty line, this is up to 60% of their weekly income.
On our visit, we saw how people are confronting these problems. In Tamborapa Pueblo, Carmen Rivera, a mother of four, has created a small organic garden to produce vegetables for her family. She guided us through her small parcel with great excitement and showed us the radishes, lettuce, peppers, beans, peaches and other vegetables that she uses to feed her family and make extra income selling the surplus. Several women in the community have followed her example creating their own gardens.People in these communities understand that sometimes the earnings from the coffee harvest are not enough and they occasionally have to rely on other sources of income such as raising chickens or guinea pigs. Many people also work on other coffee parcels to earn money for their families.The coffee cooperatives know that coffee is not enough. Though coffee exports are growing in Peru, international markets are uncertain and higher prices for quality coffee still don’t cover all of their needs.The cooperatives in this region are working to implement grassroots programs that provide health, education, and commercial opportunities to their members. Our visit gave us an intimate understanding of the reality of coffee in Peru and reinforced the belief that families in these communities have the tools to confront their challenges on their own, all they need is support and resources.
