Fair Trade Coffee in Mexico
photo credit: Café Justo
Café Justo is a cooperative of small-scale coffee farmers in Chiapas who launched an audacious enterprise in 2002. With a loan from Frontera de Cristo, a bi-national border ministry of the Presbyterian Church in the United States and Mexico, they bought a coffee roaster in Agua Prieta—a border town in the state of Sonora near Douglas, Arizona. Café Justo ships its green coffee overland from Chiapas to its Agua Prieta facility (see photo), where it is roasted and packaged before being trucked across the border to Douglas, AZ. There, the coffee is distributed through networks of volunteer supporters throughout the Southwest, mostly in religious congregations.
When Café Justo sells its coffee for $8 a pound, it keeps the whole amount. After covering the costs of processing and shipping and roasting, paying farmers $1.60 per pound for their coffee, and purchasing medical insurance for all its members, the cooperative is still able to reinvest more than $3 per pound into expanding its business.
photo credit: Café Justo
With the profits from its coffee sales to date, Café Justo has purchased another roaster in Tijuana, Baja California del Norte—just across the border from San Diego and only a short drive from Los Angeles—in the hope of replicating the Agua Prieta experience in Tijuana. It has also created the Just Trade Center, which will work to bring this model to a half-dozen other sites along the U.S.-Mexico border. CRS Mexico and the CRS Fair Trade Fund are supporting this innovative effort to help Café Justo’s visionary coffee farmers build a new model for the coffee trade and build a better life for themselves and their families.