Coffee Day | Coffee farmers: “Do customers know how hard our work is?”

Planting new coffee plants – they are increasingly struggling with the consequences of climate change. Photo: Imago/Dreamstime How does it feel to meet the people here in Germany who buy your coffee?

It's exciting to see people drinking our home-picked coffee. Going to the shops, holding the package in your hand and realizing that the coffee is sold not only in small shops but also in huge markets. We are involved in all steps of coffee production, from sowing to harvesting. But what happens at the end of the supply chain and who our consumers are was new to us.

Coffee farmers laboriously produce the raw materials for the popular drink. One of these producers is 40-year-old Maria Elizabeth Rodriguez from Nicaragua. She runs the Cosatin cooperative, which brings together 322 Nicaraguan producers to sell their organic, fair trade coffee in local stores. At the invitation of the Partnership Coffee Initiative, which strives to improve marketing opportunities for special coffees from small farmers and cooperatives in Latin America, she recently went on a lecture tour in Germany with colleagues from El Salvador and Honduras.

What do you think about how coffee is consumed here?

I thought people drank a lot more coffee here. It's a lot, but I've noticed that the high price of my organic coffee is a problem for people. Actually, we as producers should be getting more money by now, but here we see how difficult it is to sell this type of coffee at reasonable prices. I wonder if customers know how hard the work goes into making clean organic coffee? We know the whole process in its severity; It's nice to pass on this knowledge here on an equal footing, but that requires an interest in learning.

What message did you travel here with?

That people see the efforts we make so that the coffee can end up here. And that climate change affects us all. We want people to understand what we have been doing for a long time to protect coffee from this phenomenon and why we grow organically.

How do you live and work with climate change?

This year our coffee plants bloomed more than a month late. This leads to delayed and smaller harvests. The quality also drops. Every year it gets less. We are under a lot of pressure because we have to fulfill our contracts. We're thinking about what we can do about it. One strategy is the reforestation of shade trees. Banana trees are planted next to the coffee bushes to cushion extreme rain and serve as additional income alongside the coffee.

The EU deforestation regulation is giving us a headache. It is difficult to meet all the standards. Such guidelines are not always in the interests of small producers. The tax context in Nicaragua also makes everything difficult: We recently bought a coffee roasting machine in our cooperative, and a purchase like this can quickly lead to financial hardship. It may also be that you pay extra for production - this is not common, but it happens.

During your trip you visited local small-scale producers, fruit and wine growers in southern Germany, for example. What do you think about farming here?

We were very surprised that similar problems exist. Life is different and climate change seems to be happening a little more slowly here, but farmers here are also affected by vermin infestations and extreme weather. We here felt understood by each other – in the end we are all small producers. I was particularly amazed at a very young producer. In Nicaragua we have a problem getting young people interested in farming.

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