The universal language of coffee

Posted by Jane

February 12, 2010

From Hugo Villela, Regional Development Executive;

I’m writing to you from Chiapas, the southern department of Mexico, an area where the majority of the population comes from Mayan ethnic groups. Here the Catholic Church has undertaken a lot of work to develop the self sufficiency of the indigenous people, by organising them into Church based communities. Although the coffee organisation does not ask members to be Catholic, it does follow deep Christian values.

The population of Chiapas was abandoned by the government for many years until 1994 when Zapatistas (Zapatista Army for National Liberation) declared war against the Mexican State and the Zapatistas began to mobilise the social forces of Chiapas with the aim of putting the agenda of the indigenous people on the national development agenda. After more than 15 years of movement, you can see Chiapas is a region where the state is now investing in roads and supporting producers’ organisations with grants and loans. On the other hand Chiapas is a drug smuggling transit region and this, mixed with the inequity of wealth distribution, could create a very explosive social situation if the communities did not have the moral and continuous support of values from their religious movement.

So I have been crossing Chiapas from the coast line (Tapachula) through the mountain chains to get Jaltenango and from Jaltenango to San Cristobal de las Casas and from San Cristobal to Comitan de Dominguez; this is the only way to understand how the producers life is and how the organisations operate to collect coffee and complete contracts with specialty coffee buyers.

Most of the producer groups are fair trade and organic. They collect coffee from medium altitude and high altitude areas. The mountains are green with big rocks on top and the density of the population is quite low. This enabled me to understand how the coffee turnover works here and helped me to have all the details to support the applications I will write for Chiapas producer groups.

San Cristobal de las Casas is by far the most beautiful city I have visited while working for Shared Interest. It is a colonial town with a mix of different ethnic groups, there are people from France, Germany, UK, United States, Mexico, Lebanon and Latin American countries.

Away from the town, where producers live, are small towns where only a few people speak Spanish; most of them speak their dialects, incomprehensible to me. But you can still read on people faces what they want to express and I understand their coffee operation… coffee joins us!!

What is quite sad is the high amount of children selling handicrafts on the streets until late hours in the night; many of them sent by their parents. Being a typical town in Latin America with high differences among the ones who have and the ones who don’t have, makes a violent social difference, like a seed of hate among us, which the most clear manifestation of this can be drug gangs, “mareros”.

So, I keep working hard, to see if I can do some Mexican proposals for our customer portfolio, I love what I do, for the producers in connection with British Investors.