In coffee growing areas around the world coffee producers have joined together into cooperatives to help spread the cost of coffee production. These cooperatives range from a few small farms to several hundred. All have different cultural practices, needs, and goals. Locate the area your coffee grows and meet the farmers who care for the beans you drink everyday.
Fair Trade is an organized social movement and market-based approach that aims to help producers in developing countries obtain better trading conditions and promote sustainability.
The movement advocates the payment of a higher price to producers as well as social and environmental standards.
It focuses in particular on exports from developing countries to developed countries, most notably handicrafts, coffee, cocoa, sugar, tea, bananas, honey, cotton, wine, fresh fruit, chocolate and flowers.
Organic coffee does not use pesticides or other chemical solutions to solve natural problems of bugs, pests and fungus. Organic methods include building healthy soil through composting, terracing, and inter-cropping. Organic farmers utilize biological pest control. They incorporate shaded trees and various other sustainable agricultural tools for the health of their coffee trees. They are moving towards the sustainability of the soil, water and ecosystem they use.
Cooperatives are associations of varying numbers of small farmers that act as a large business entity in the market striving to maximize the benefits they generate for their members.
We're a small group of professionals working together to formulate ways to empower consumers to make different more socially conscious choices.
In a world over run by propaganda posing as information our goal is to provide simplicity and clarity to products.
We hope to help answer the ever present questions:
"Why should I care?"
"What does it mean to me?"
Air quality is sumatra is terrible and it affects us
Many of the organic farming practices used in growing coffee could also be practiced growing rice. Composting for instance is not practiced in the rice fields as seen by the smokey skies caused by burning piles of rice chaff. Indonesia has a very large carbon footprint in comparison to the rest of the developing world because of the constant burning.
The unseen costs of poor resource use
Burning rain forests and rice fields will eventually cost countries like Indonesia economically. They have the opportunity to realize the real value behind their resouces but up till now still choose to take the short term gain not considering the environmental impact on their land and the weight of an uneducated population.
What is life really like in a cooperative?
Arinigata Cooperative is located in the Gayo mountains of Aceh, Sumatra. In 2004 the region emerged from 25 years of civil war. USAID with PPKGO cooperative help establish fair trade and organic argiculture processes in the region. It has become an integral part of developing a stable economic structure for the farmers.
On our visit to the area in 2009 we talked at length with the farmers. We wanted to know what was their biggest concern. In a nutshell all the answers came down to economics. They needed any means that provided them the tools to support their families. They unanamously wanted their children to have a different life not just a life of farming.
Take a walk through the village
Cooperatives are often made up of generations of families.
APKO Cooperative, Sumatra 2009
Arinagata Cooperative, Sumatra 2009
