Grounds for change
Photo: Photo: Gilvan Barreto/OxfamView a slideshow of photos from coffee cooperatives
Five stages of the coffee harvest
Oxfam has been working with members of the all-female cooperative, COMUCAP, in Macala, Western Honduras, since 2000. When the project began, the women, many illiterate, had limited administrative capacity. The land they owned was barely enough to survive. Some seven years later, these entrepreneurial farmer women are exporting Fairtrade organic coffee to international markets.
Stage one: picking
Coffee cooperative COMUCAP collectively own a coffee farm at San Martin, just outside Macala. The farm is divided into 15 small parcels of land owned by individual female members of the cooperative. From the end of November the coffee berries are ripe and ready to be picked.
Stage two: extracting the bean
Lorenzo Carrilho and Jose Zelaia (sons of the female members of COMUCAP) collect the wet red berry coffee from the collective coffee farm and bring it to the mill in Carocol in trucks.? Here they are pouring the wet coffee berries into the mill.
The mill removes the coffee beans from the berry. Each berry contains two coffee beans. Nothing is wasted. Organic fertiliser is made from the pulp using worms. The workers earn 70 lempira ($4.50) a day, plus extra hours at night.
Stage three: drying
The coffee beans need to be thoroughly dry before they can be sorted for export or roasting. The coffee beans are taken to the drying patios to dry under the sun. Sun dried coffee tastes better. If the weather’s good it will take two to three days to dry. When it no longer feels wet, the shell is removed. Coffee like this is called ‘gold coffee’. It will sit in sacks in the warehouse to settle and then it is ready to be roasted or exported.
Stage four: resting
Good coffee needs to rest for a few weeks before it can be sorted. It is during this period of rest that the coffee beans begin to establish their flavour.
Stage five: classification
The dried coffee is classified by hand. Classification involves removing the shell from the dried beans, then removing any faulty or black beans.
Interviewer: Kate Pattison Date: February 2007
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