Mexico comes to Haiti
April 16, 2008

The Haitian farmers at the coffee workshop held in Baradères on January 8-10, 2008, were clear about their goals.

“We want to grow coffee like our parents and grandparents did,” said one. “We want help to produce coffee we can be proud to sell,” said another.

This was the first workshop sponsored by Just Haiti to help local coffee growers form an association and produce coffee for the export market.

On January 5, four members of the Just Haiti team—Kim, Jim, Judith and Suzie—arrived in Port-au-Prince. We met and traveled on to Baradères with three other people: cousins Eri and Reynaldo Cifuentes are members of Café Justo, a cooperative of Mexican coffee farmers, while Tommy Bassett works with Frontera de Cristo, a U.S. organization that helped Café Justo get started. Kim had first encountered Café Justo in 2005 while working on the U.S.- Mexico border.

Café Justo follows a "fair-trade-plus" business model we hope the Haitian growers can adapt to their unique situation. Café Justo guarantees its members a fair trade price. It also owns the roasting business, the source of most of the profit in the coffee industry. Profits from the cooperative have enabled Café Justo to provide health care to its members and a water purification system and other infrastructure improvements for their town, Salvador Urbina, in the Mexican state of Chiapas.

In short, Café Justo practices grower-owned, community-based, quality coffee production, and we wanted Eri and Reynaldo to show their Haitian colleagues how it works.

In Baradères, the two Mexican growers conducted the workshop for about 25 Haitian growers representing 18 very small rural communities. On January 8, Eri and Reynaldo accompanied Haitian growers on visits to several coffee fields so they could examine local conditions firsthand.

For the next two days, The Mexicans explained how to maintain the trees, shade and groundcover so that yields and quality would improve. And they took the Haitians through a step-by-step explanation of everything else they have done to create and maintain a successful cooperative business.

Eri and Reynaldo spoke to the growers in Spanish; Tommy or Kim then translated into English, which Judith translated into Haitian Creole. The process reversed when the Haitians responded and asked questions. It sounds—and was—complicated, but it worked. It was a unique encounter of peers, with subsistence growers from Mexico supporting and training subsistence growers from Haiti.

The Mexicans told the Haitians that Café Justo growers produce the same type of coffee under weather and shade conditions similar to Baradères. The big difference is that the Haitians process their beans using a dry-processing method. This saves time and requires much less water and equipment—and therefore less expense, but it leaves the coffee with a flavor that U.S. consumers are not accustomed to.

Some of the Haitians said they are familiar with the wet-processing method Eri and Reynaldo taught them, because their parents or grandparents had used it. But the near-total collapse of the Haitian coffee industry—and export market—in recent decades made wet processing too costly for most growers.

At the end of the workshop, the Haitian growers asked Just Haiti for help putting into action the agricultural practices Eri and Reynaldo suggested.

We responded by contracting with a young agronomist, Atila Getro, who grew up in a Baradères coffee-growing family, to guide them through the changeover. We also told them that once they are ready we will provide them with a very low or no-interest loan to buy the machinery they need, to be paid back out of coffee sales. [September 2009 update on status of loan]

Eri and Reynaldo also said they would remain involved. They are making good on that pledge by offering prayers for their Haitian brothers and sisters at their cooperative meetings. We at Just Haiti hope to continue to facilitate exchanges between the Mexican and Haitian growers.

And we have begun selling the first, tiny batch of Baradères coffee, appropriately named Kafe Lespwa—Haitian Creole for "coffee of hope." You can order the coffee online, or pick some up in person at an official launch for Just Haiti in Takoma Park, Md., on May 3.

Just Haiti works to alleviate poverty, hunger, violence, illiteracy and disease in Haiti by fostering small-business development, education programs, employment opportunity, infrastructure improvement and environmental quality. Just Haiti is a Section 501(c)(3) tax-exempt charitable organization.

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