Cooperatives, Supply Chain, Community Needs

“Thank you for visiting my country, thank you for buying our coffee.” This is a refrain that is heard often on the annual visits I’ve been a part of to date. There is the sense that we – the producer and the coffee roaster – are in a sort of symbiosis, much like the cows and the white egrets I see in coffeelands. Without producers to sell us a product, we would not be in business; and without the market that we offer, producers would not be making a living off of coffee.

This trip I spent the first couple of days checking out a cooperative in Mexico that is not a current partner and then ventured on to two cooperatives in Guatemala that we already buy from The first group brought to light all of my questions about the strengths and difficulties that ensue in the day-to-day running of a cooperative. The second group had me thinking about the economics of the supply chain itself in greater detail. Both groups continued to fan the fire of my interest in defining best practices as coffee roasters join forces with and become a part of development projects. How can we best go about providing support that will enhance our relationship with producers and also meet community needs.

Cooperatives After Mexico, I found myself waiting at the Guatemalan border without my contact to pick me up as planned. Come to find out, I wouldn’t be meeting him at all as he had passed on his leadership role to another man in the cooperative.

I know that shifts in leadership can be common in cooperatives. And, perhaps just as often as you find someone fit for the role, you also find the cooperative members struggling to get their needs met when someone without adequate training takes up the new post. In this case, the previous leader was the information holder and left his replacement and his support team in the board of directors without much of the necessary information to continue on successfully in his absence

One of the guys I was traveling alongside said he thought his job was potentially easier because he did not deal much with cooperatives. Yet, the cooperative fills a truly necessary space in the coffee supply chain – allowing smaller producers access to the market in a way they would not otherwise have. Still, it seems that the advantages to cooperatives are often counter-balanced by an equal number of challenges including leadership that is lacking and understaffing. These challenges can make the goals of the cooperative (the selling of their coffee) difficult.

As I gather more experiences here, I wonder what capacity building at the cooperative level could look like – i.e. intensive workshops on communication, goal setting, and shared leadership… capacity building that would be to the advantage of both co-op members, leaders, and buyers alike. A more functional cooperative would seemingly be a more productive cooperative…it’s members and leaders would be more satisfied, and buyers would have a more efficient and effective team to work with.

Supply chain - All I’m asking is that you open up a space in your consciousness to the experience of the small producer.

Andre, the cooperative manager at the second cooperative must have said this to me at least a handful of times. Truly though, it’s not difficult to imagine the plight of the small producer for anyone who has been to coffee origin countries or really listened as others spoke of the experience. Walking up winding steep hills and and then imagining carrying sacks of coffee cherries on one’s shoulders is certainly empathy building, as is learning about and experiencing the maintenance involved in keeping trees healthy (and more so now, with the leaf rust epidemic)– pruning, fertilizing, etc. all spread out over rough terrain- the effort is endless.

At the end of the day, I feel like I work for the type of business that does have that space in their consciousness opened and recognizes the effort involved. We work with cooperatives; we pay higher premiums; we build long-term relationships; we are as transparent as we possibly can be, to try to bridge the numerous gaps we are conscious of already. Yet somehow I become tongue tied when I try to communicate this to cooperative leadership, to a producer.

Each meeting with producers, in addition to hearing “thank you for buying our coffee” I also hear “this is a really difficult life.” And more often than not, when I ask most producers if their children are learning how to be coffee farmers or if they want them to farm, they say pretty resolutely, “no.” They want them to get an education, to have a career, to make a “better life” for themselves. So, I continue to search for ways to contextualize for myself, to explain, as I referenced in the first entry, why our business partners at the beginning of the supply chain continue to struggle and how my company and I can be an effective part of the solution.

Community needs

There is a delicate balance between focusing on the business of coffee and an awareness of the other needs in coffee communities that may decrease their ability to focus on the coffee. I agree wholeheartedly that as an employee of a coffee company, it is my role to seek out other resources that can help and that it is not my role to take on the work of development myself. However, the nuances of the best way to go about building these alliances remain blurry to me.

Who else, besides the cooperative and besides the coffee company should be at the table? And what if there are few other resources around to help diversify the assistance?

As previously noted, cooperatives can get spread really thin, and when they start to focus on other community needs, they can potentially lose the nucleus that held them together to begin with – being good at the sale of coffee. In many ways, I think neither the cooperative nor the roaster is the best party to carry out such projects. Leveraging the power we have as a buyer and the knowledge of capacity and needs the cooperative has can enable us to bring in a third party to help. The challenge comes in finding localized, smaller non-profits (my personal preference) in more remote coffee communities. Here is where I see great potential benefit in collaboration and coalition building among various roasters and even across producer groups – trends that are catching on more and more. I think the details are important, however, and more intentionality and more monitoring and evaluation as this spark starts to catch will be necessary.

Thanks for reading, and, as always, your thoughts on any or all of the above are more than welcome! Please share.

Next up… more on microlots, a theme that has become popularized throughout the supply chain and will be discussed at SCAA Symposium in a couple of weeks.