Mountains to Markets: A Haitian Coffee Farmer Interview
When Ogisna Journal enters a room, people notice. She moves with conviction, listens attentively and speaks with passion. What she is most passionate about? Coffee.
Ogisna is the president of the coffee cooperative COOPAVEC in Haiti, one of six coffee cooperatives taking part in Catholic Relief Services’ Mountains to Markets project. The program seeks to revive coffee in a country prone to natural disasters.
As the first part of the name suggests, the program started in the mountains located in the southern region of Beaumont. There, CRS provided technical support to 3,000 small-scale coffee growers in order to improve their coffee and diversify their crops.
“The majority of the people in our community are coffee producers. Coffee is my livelihood. But we only harvest coffee once a year”, Ogisna says.
The money they make by selling their crops is not enough to sustain a family for 12 months. Besides supporting coffee crops CRS is encouraging farmers to diversify their crops. Families in Beaumont now tend home gardens with products they can include in their daily diet.
With her right index finger, Ogisna ticks off all the fingers of her left hand, enumerating the new products she cultivates to sell when there is no more coffee left: “bananas, ginger, yams, potatoes, corn.”
However, coffee still is the main source of income. This is why the second half of the project name is also important: coffee growers in Haiti need to sell to new markets in order to advance.
New farming techniques and more resistant seeds have improved the quality of the coffee grown in Beaumont. Word of this success has reached consumers outside Haiti who are now purchasing the main ingredient for their cup of java from these six cooperatives.
“With the help of CRS we are selling our coffee to exporters and we have a better price,” Ogisna says.
The cooperatives in Beaumont are working on becoming Fair Trade Certified. They’ve learned that fair trade will not only connect them with buyers who want their coffee, but buyers who care about them, about their communities.
As part of Mountains to Markets, CRS invited Ogisna to be part of a delegation of Haitian coffee producers that took part of the Specialty Coffee Association of America’s annual convention in Boston. There she was able to meet producers from different countries, buyers and distributors. She also had the opportunity to visit the headquarters of CRS’ partner Equal Exchange and see how the beans growers like her collect at home are processed, packed and branded.
“It was very important to see it with my own eyes,” Ogisna says. “I’ve gained perspective of the coffee industry. Now I have a vision of what we can accomplish in Haiti.”
To purchase coffee from Mountains to Markets click here.
Guest Post by Alsy Acevedo, CRS Latin America & Caribbean Communications
