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Guatemala to trade fairly |
Caravan Coffee owner Pete
Miller returned from a two-week vacation to Guatemala with a album
full of photos — and a deal with coffee grower Jorge Sanchez.
Miller showed slides and discussed his trip to the San Jorge coffee
farm with clients and staff June 6 at the Caravan Coffee offices on
Ninth Street.
 “We’d started
blending Central American coffee — mainly Mexican, but we found the
Guatemalan varieties worked better and better,” Miller said. “We
started with just one bag a year, but now we’ll be buying half our
beans from this farm.”
This deal will bring about 50,000 pounds of Sanchez’s coffee to
Caravan per year, a tenth of the farm’s total yield.
Miller and his wife visited Guatemala in January, the middle of the
harvest season, to observe operations at the 200-acre farm, located
outside Guatemala City near the border with Honduras.
“Guatemala is the tenth-largest coffee producing region in the
world,” Miller said. “We had the chance to meet several other
roasters at our exporter’s office and visit the Sanchez family
home.”
The journey to Guatemala was both a personal quest for Miller — “We
buy coffee from 20 different places and I hope to visit them all,”
he said — as well as a chance to practice good business.
Many coffee sellers advertise beans with a “Fair Trade”
certification, grown by a network of co-op farms and sold to
association members at a price that benefits growers. Dealing
directly with growers, Miller said, is his own alternative.
“The (Fair Trade) brand addresses problems in the industry where
farmers in certain regions aren’t earning a living wage,” he said.
“We like to be able to source our beans directly and develop more
options than the blends available through that program, but also
offer a fair price for the beans we purchase.”
Touring the coffee farm was also a highlight of the trip for
Miller.
“It’s shade-grown coffee — the bushes need to be protected from the
tropical sun, so they’re planted beneath large trees,” he said. “If
you didn’t know what coffee plants looked like, you’d think you were
in the middle of the jungle.” |
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From
July 11, 2007,
Newberg Graphic
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