Improving lives growing coffee

From the IPS News Service comes a success story out of El Salvador about a cooperative selling organic, high quality coffee:

COMASAGUA, El Salvador, Dec 4 (IPS) - "We need to produce more coffee, because our customers want more of it, the demand is greater than what we produce," José Antonio Sandoval, a Salvadoran small farmer and an expert on growing and selling organic, traditional, gourmet aromatic coffee, said with pride.

Sandoval is a leader of the Santa Adelaida cooperative, aimed at protecting the environment by producing coffee without agrochemicals, while increasing income and consolidating social programmes for its members, who have historically been marginalised, have little education and are stunted by poverty. It's a perfect undertaking, an ideal match with their cooperative vision. (more)

Comments

Anonymous said…
Comasagua is a beautiful little town just a short 30 minute drive from San Salvador. The air is fresh and clear with a breathtaking view on the road going up to it. Although there´s nothing to attract tourists or even development, land values are sky high there. Locals tell us the reason is little land ever goes up for sale as most of it is part of coffee plantations. Beautiful place, good people.
Anonymous said…
For some reason this story reminds me of this guy: Enrique Alvarez:

http://www.math.dartmouth.edu/~lamperti/centralamerica_presente.html

That cooporporative management is probably what he wanted to establish nationally to help the workers, improve their life conditions, whilst always remaining productive. Too bad this crude and savage country never really appreciates doing the "right thing". At least this story you tell us is a good one, a wonderful exception.

It is a bitter-sweet irony that that Sandoval guy was an ex-military, surely the murderer of dozens if not hundreds of people, and one of the folks that apparently DID benefit from PDC's agrarian reform.

Even sweeter is this part "Ramírez said that many of the large producers of conventional coffee, who are still living in opulence and nostalgic for past glories, "were left behind working on the basis of an obsolete system, because previously customers demanded volume, but now they want quality." ", because it shows clearly what I said in a previous occassion... the dinosaur "elite" retrograde scum that dominate this country still yearn for the "patron-peon relation", the times when they were lords of their land and had hundreds of incompetent, uneducated, poor, hungry vassals breaking their backs and their childrens working for them for a roof and food. Call it slavery.

Looking at the article, I notice "prominent" *coughbullshitpeople* names. Like the Dueñas, the Borja, Prieto, Borgonovo, several of them people involved in corruption scandals, so I am not sure how this corporation works, but it is grand to see that the humane system that martyr of Enrique Alvarez wanted to establish is becoming the future's "new way". I do hope it becomes the standard, and I do hope the workers benefit from the system. Because it has always been abominable, subhuman, infernal, diabolical, vomiticious, nauseating, horrible, that all the rich folks in this country made their riches out of the backs of workers who never saw real fruit from their hard work. All of this, because the system by itself already supported such disparity, but also because they were able to purchase the parasitic army.

Funny thing is, that the "dinosaurs" cocoroach brains of the "elite", if they had heeded Alvarez's suggestions, the civil war could've probably been hm, avoided? And this kind of organic, high-quality coffee production would've been given a "full speed ahead" since the 1973s. It is funny how the success of such thing appears to come due to the ever volatile coffee market, the dinosaurs are retreating and things are evolving. Good.

Either way. Wonderful news.