|
|
|
 News Around the Republic of Mexico | May 2008 
Border Coffee Roaster Helps Keep Migrants in Mexico
 Tim Gaynor - Reuters
go to original
| | Cafe Justo coffee roasting facility in Agua Prieta. | | |
Agua Prieta, Mexico A small coffee roaster on the U.S.-Mexico border is tapping into the growing fair-trade market, convincing Mexican farmers to stay home and grow beans instead of abandoning their crops to migrate north.
When coffee prices crashed in the late 1990s because of an excess in global supplies, many coffee farmers simply left their lands to search for jobs in the United States or in the booming manufacturing sector on the Mexico side of the border.
But with coffee prices recovering in recent years and increased border monitoring making life harder for migrants, some have decided to return to their towns and take advantage of new niche markets for high-quality organic blends.
The Cafe Justo roaster in the border town of Agua Prieta, just south of Douglas, Arizona, is using techniques pioneered by export factories or maquiladoras to distribute coffee from the southern state of Chiapas to U.S. consumers.
After the coffee crisis, coffee farmers from the village of Salvador Urbina in Chiapas were looking for ways to keep more of the profits whittled away by roasters and retailers.
They formed the Cafe Justo cooperative near the U.S. border in 2002 with the help of a priest and a former factory manager and began to process their own beans, marketing their brand directly to socially conscious consumers.
We wanted the people who had left because of low coffee prices to go back to their communities, said coffee farmer Daniel Cifuentes, who left Chiapas a decade ago and now runs the Cafe Justo's office in Agua Prieta.
With a $20,000 loan from a local church, Cafe Justo, which means Just Coffee, bought their first coffee roaster and began toasting the shade-grown arabica, marago and robusta beans shipped up from Chiapas on the same bus line that for years had brought migrants north.
Drawing on the expertise of former export-assembly plant manager Tommy Bassett, the cooperative set up a distribution network using UPS to export coffee to church groups in the United States on demand.
The only way they will get it as fresh is if they get from the roaster direct, said Rev. Mark Adams, speaking at the project's U.S. office in Douglas.
MORE BUSINESS
The popularity of fair-trade products, which claim to more directly benefit producers, has helped Cafe Justo grow their business five-fold.
In 2003, the cooperative exported the equivalent of 101 96-pound sacks of toasted, ground coffee, generating income $72,000 to help two dozen families in the village near Mexico's southern border with Guatemala.
Five years on, sales have grown to 485 sacks of grounds generating revenues of $367,000 to support 40 families.
With the profits the co-op has built processing facilities and a water purification plant in the village and set up a pension plan and health insurance for members.
Cafe Justo is now working to recreate the successful model by setting up roasting and export operations in the border towns of Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez.
What the farmers have started creating is the most effective response to the immediate crisis of immigration that I know of, said Adams. People are going back because there are possibilities, he said.
(Editing by Marguerita Choy) |
| |
|
Vallarta Weddings
Tell a Friend
Site Map
Print this Page
Email Us