Whirlwind tour of El Salvador

The whirlwind visit took us from ACOES, a cooperative comprised of 29 families working a collective parcel of land outside the town of Tacuba in the western department of Ahuachapa – to APICAFE, a consortium of 12 farmer organizations in the eastern department of San Miguel – and finally to COMUS, a region-wide coordinator of farmer groups and projects in the central department of Usulatan.

Starting from modest beginning, ACOES maintains lofty goals. Members were able to acquire their 45 hectares of land during a land reform program enacted during the Duarte presidency in the 1980s. At that time, these families had little experience with coffee production and next to no experience with neither national nor international markets. Their members have worked hard to renovate aging plants and to learn about organic production practices. By the year 2000, they were able to achieve organic certification and to maintain their certification since then. However, it was only in 2007 that they were able to establish their first direct contact in the Fair Trade and Organic market. In 2007 Cooperative Coffees purchased their first half-container of premium quality coffee – the proceeds of which helped to dig them out of a 10-year cycle of debt!

At the same time, ACOES is currently setting up its own wet processing “eco-mill” with support from a Catholic Relief coffee development project. This will allow the farmers to better control the risk of over-fermentation and to greatly reduce costs of processing.

APICAFE: (the Consorcio of Associated beekeepers and Coffee Farmers from the Western Region of El Salvador)., or the “Consorcio” as it is called locally, is a relatively new organization – founded in 2005 – with nine primary members: Cooperativa Marias 93; Cooperativa Jucuapense; Cooperativa San Mauricio; Cooperativa Luz en el Horizonte; Cooperativa Santa Maria; Cooperativa de Berlin; Group Las Casitas; Grupo Cerro Verde; and the Seccional de Apicultores of Tecapan… representing a total of 350 farming families.  Around 30 percent of the membership is made of women and youth.

APICAFE was founded with the primary objective of supporting its members by strengthening their business capacity and management, offering technical assistance in organic coffee and honey production practices, supporting members’ efforts to open and expand new markets both locally and internationally, and creating new business opportunities for women and youth. They are currently active with several innovative projects to improve production yields, internal infrastructure (including a wet processing plant, a collective coffee plant nursery, and coffee roasting, grinding and packaging plant) quality improvement and diversification of their product lines and markets.

They have a very dynamic producer Board of Directors – led by BoD president Maria Rosa Elena Romero – and are supported by community representatives from the associated cooperatives. This new association appears to have all the elements in place to make big impact in the region!

COMUS: In the 1980s, nearly 60 communities in the department of Usulutan came together in a series of meetings to discuss their development challenges. COMUS was created to offer health, educational, organizational, infrastructural, and production services to a seriously marginalized civilian population.

By 1990, COMUS, with the support of local communities and international help, defined 4 areas of their work: health, organization, production, and education. The organization faced many obstacles in the initial stages of their formation. Nonetheless, they found support and aid from international organizations and were able to develop projects such as literacy programs, women’s health initiatives and organic coffee production.

Here we discovered a very small coffee farmer cooperative under the wing of COMUS, but with good potential for growth. The COMUS coffees that grow at low altitudes (350 to 500 meters above sea level) from the Zipotil Cooperative (a sub-group of farmers under the COMUS umbrella) were very soft/mild and sold primarily to the local market as roasted and ground coffee. The big market for this coffee is packaged in “28-gram sachets” and sold for 15-cents each in community stores.  The higher elevation Bourbon and Pacas variety coffees from Las Conchas Cooperative show good body, sweetness, and fruit in the cup. With good production practices and some effort to bring volumes up to export levels, this coffee could fill an interesting niche in Fair Trade markets.

But despite the diversity we came across throughout the visits, most farmer groups shared a similar backdrop: lack of adequate infrastructure, without access to information on best quality practices, nor with reliable communication to buyers – their possibilities of establishing Fair Trade and organic market contracts are very limited.

All suffer acute financial deficiencies. Due to the inherent risk of the international coffee market and the particular situation of farmers with no hard assets, they are considered “not credit worthy” at national commercial banks. This lack of access to formal credits has left most farmers stuck in a vicious cycle of debt with local lenders – who tend to offer credits early in the production season at high interest rates in exchange for a certain amount of coffee at harvest time… negotiated in advance at below market exchange prices.

Despite these obvious and at times, seemingly overwhelming challenges, we were also struck by the indomitable spirit of the Salvadoran people. It was a moving testimony of their desire and ability to work hard and creatively to improve their economic situation to the benefit of their families and communities.

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