When I was in Jinotega the other day, as well as talking to a singing policeman I found out a bit about Soppexcca. They are a union of 18 Coffee Cooperatives, and every one of their 600 small farms is Fairtrade. This is one of them that also has rooms for tourists and coffee tours...
The premium they get by selling their crop to organisations that buy Fairtrade goes on: schools, uniforms, roads, health projects, the infrastructure of their coffee mill. That other farms without certification in the area benefit from all these things is no bad thing in the eyes of the manager – she sees it as good motivation for the other farmers to join eventually. The farmers in their union of cooperatives also don´t have a problem this year even though the price is lower in the ´normal´ market: they’ve been selling Fairtrade for 6 years and the farmers understand the concepts behind it. The union have done workshops and produced information about the benefits, and the obligations. I've got a great little booklet they produced for the farmers, it's useful for my spanish too...! This general education is no mean feat when you imagine that a large chunk of those 600 farms will be relying on those local buses I´ve talked about for transport, they’re all spread far and wide around the department of Jinotega, up dirt tracks and the sides of old volcanoes, and their main type of work is agriculture and not sitting around chatting about quality standards.
But Soppexcca are only able to sell about 80% of their coffee Fairtrade. And that’s a good percentage from what I’ve found, some organisations are as low as 20%. So you work to get the certificate, you pay to keep it year on year, and yet you don’t get that much-needed social premium money back on 100% of your produce. There just aren´t the people buying Fairtrade... so it has to get sold on the normal market.
Here's their website.. More coffee soon!
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