Coffee producers from Central America and Indonesia dominated the Taiwan International Coffee Show at the Taipei Nangang Exhibition Center yesterday, sending a strong message that small-scale farmers and their families rely on sustainable supply chains.
“For every five US dollars some big brands make, the farmer only gets one cent. As you can imagine, it’s an unfair game,” Zircle Coffee founder and CEO Elias Rivera told the Central News Agency.
His company promotes sustainable supply chains in his home country of Honduras, working with small farmers and buying coffee beans at a 10 to 20 percent premium compared with market prices, Rivera said.
Photo: Reuters
Zircle Coffee buys at higher prices because he has seen big coffee brands and intermediaries take advantage of smaller farmers, who are vulnerable due to limited access to information on the market value of their product, Rivera said.
“We are trying to form long-term relationships with the farmers. They are the most important people, but actually they are the ones who get the least,” he said.
Rivera was not the only industry representative among the 230 exhibitors across 820 booths who promoted a farmer-centric approach at the 19th edition of the annual show, which opened on Friday and ends today.
Guatemalan coffee importer Alvaro Lopez from JAK International Trade Co said that one of the bigger farms he works with supports four schools, two hospitals and an apartment complex where its workers can live rent-free.
Programs that give farmers’ children access to free basic education and scholarships for higher education are meaningful because it means that kids would not spend their childhood working on farms, he said.
“Sometimes kids prefer to help their parents’ farm so they will earn more profits, but we prefer the kids to go to school and learn skills. If the kids later want to become farmers, that is great, but at least they have tools to improve their lives,” Lopez said.
JAK also buys from family farms that would otherwise have no access to the international market, he said.
“It is very important to have that relationship with the person who is actually in the farm instead of the businessman who is in the office and might not even know how the coffee is actually processed,” Lopez said.
Taiwanese Aimee Chan (詹雅雯), a manager at EOE Indonesia, said that the firm works with local farmers who produce kopi luwak — an Indonesian specialty coffee from beans partly digested by Asian palm civets — to help the producers empower themselves.
The company also promotes collecting beans from droppings of wild civets instead of caging the animals, Chan said.
“I love animals ... and when we opened EOE Indonesia, the one thing we wanted to do was preserve the environment, and caging the luwak is not part of that,” EOE founder Peter Masyuni said during a visit to Taiwan last year, referring to the civets by their Indonesian name.
The Taiwan International Coffee Show is one of the Asia-Pacific region’s largest coffee fair, attracting up to 200,000 visitors every year.
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