Pioneering South to South Fair Trade

A DIARY OF A TRIP TO CENTRAL AND SOUTH AMERICA FOR PATRICIA ALEXANDER, ELISABETH WILSON AND HUGO VILLELA

Thursday 6 November

We awoke to the shocking news that the Bank of England has lowered UK interest rates by 1.5% to 3%. This coupled with the strengthened Dollar will have a big impact on our business.

We spent today with Alvaro Gomez Ferreto, the General Manager of Coocafe, another coffee producer. First we visited their office and warehouse in Heredia just outside San Jose prior to taking a long but very beautiful drive to Tilaran and then back to La Fortuna. For some reason, it appears that Coocafe’s facility with Shared Interest has lapsed so the main objective of this meeting was its reactivation as Coocafe are keen to continue working with Shared Interest. Near to Tilaran, we visited their coffee shop and roasting facilities where they also intend to build some hotel accommodation and to establish a museum displaying some now-unused coffee machinery. The thinking behind this project is to pioneer and promote south-south trade and they have already started to rebrand and re-label their coffee in order to support this initiative. (Currently many of the products grown on the African and Latin American continents are sold to European and North American buyers. One of the goals of the fair trade movement is to encourage producers in ‘the South’ to sell their products at a fair price locally thus increasing knowledge about fair trade. This is exactly what Coocafe hopes to achieve in Costa Rica).

The journey back to La Fortuna was very difficult in the torrential rain and beneath the very dramatic lightning. We were staying at a hotel that I had stayed in on holiday earlier this year and it was good to return, albeit without my husband. Alvaro joined us for a drink and, as we listened to the howler monkeys in the trees, we tried to persuade him that he must make the journey from London to Newcastle when he is next in the UK.