A Fairer Trade

It's synonymous with work, dating, socializing, commuting, networking, studying or just taking a break from whatever it is you were doing before. And it's profitable to the tune of more than 500 million American cups consumed each day in kitchens, shops, break rooms and drive-thrus.

Yet, the conditions necessary for cultivating the world's growing coffee habit can't just be transplanted or recreated in a plot behind your house or at a 21st century-mechanized farm in the midwestern United States.

“These are places that for the most part, none of us would go unless we had a real reason to,” says Kickapoo Coffee co-owner Caleb Nicholes.

From the United States, it takes a daylong international flight, a four-hour drive to the last city on paved roads, another to the last city on dirt roads, and then another leg to get to farflung farms in Peru.

Then there's Bolivia, to Peru's southeast, with its seven-hour passage from the capital La Paz down to coffee country on a path affectionately dubbed “Death Road.” That's where Nicholes became very sick on his first visit to the country's coffee farms after co-founding his company in 2005.

“[It's] switchbacks and blind corners, and if the car makes a wrong turn, you're going off a cliff,” Nicholes recalls.

Coffee grows in a specific belt on the globe between the tropics. It all depends on an uncommon combination of altitude and temperature to flourish, long before it's roasted and lands in a grocery aisle or barista's stock. On a near constant basis, company buyers journey to these equatorial pockets of the world to advise and make deals with farmers, importers, millers, shippers and more.

Buyers travel to places that are principally remote, likely in Latin America, Central Africa and Southeast Asia. While coffee-growing is massively industrialized in places like Brazil and Vietnam (which produce half the world's annual 19 billion pounds of coffee), the land on which coffee can be grown purely, responsibly, and certainly organically, is geographically finite.

On a broader economic level, sometimes a coffee-producing country can encourage a healthy and sustainable future by enjoying, and in turn, understanding the fruits of its own labor. Cuevas says nations like Brazil, Mexico and Colombia have seen vast increases in coffee sales and retail within their borders and that the presence of coffee shops in Latin America is growing rapidly. When the coffee doesn't have as far to travel to reach its audience, Cuevas adds, producers will receive clearer and more immediate signals with regard to demand.

As with Project Congo, these possibilities give women and young people a reason to participate in the coffee sector. Cuevas points out that if coffee production doesn't look like a career that offers security, creativity and prosperity, young people in Latin America won't do it. They'll move to cities “and try their luck there.”

In-country consumption helps coffee production look less like a disconnected step and more like an multi-faceted economy. Rwanda, a country ravaged by genocide in the 1990s, now boasts one of the most uplifting international coffee stories according to Cuevas.

In a small nation facing an imbalance of workforce size to agricultural space, Sustainable Harvest's Project Rwanda is in its third year of training low income women farmers and helping them control processing after harvest time.