The coffee story

Our community spent the last few months harvesting coffee. They call this difficult month's-long coffee-harvesting affair la brega con café. Since I don't really know how to pick coffee, pulp coffee or get the mules to haul sacks of coffee, I spent some time just learning about the coffee process and documenting it in photos.

All the coffee where we live is shade-grown which means all the work such as pruning, fertilizing, and harvesting is done by hand. Good coffee is a very labor-intensive crop. There are coffees that can be grown in the sun at lower altitudes which can then be machine harvested. This greatly reduces the price of the coffee, but sun-grown coffee is not very good. If you buy cheap Maxwell House or Folgers coffee, it comes mostly from cheap sun-grown coffee with enough shade-grown coffee thrown in to make it palatable. But if you like real coffee, not Maxwell or Folgers junk, all the coffee you buy is shade-grown and hand-picked. My pictures are representative of how most the the DR's good coffee is produced. I'm sure the coffee story doesn't change that much in other countries.

This is why fair-trade becomes important in products like coffee. Coffee is mostly produced by small rural farmers living in remote mountainous regions. They often have no control over the market. The big buyers come in and pay whatever they want (often unfairly low prices) and the coffee farmers have no choice but accept. The buyer can then sell the coffee on the world market at a premium, pocketing most of the profit that should really be going to the coffee producers.

Also coffee is usually harvested by (often illegal) migrant workers. In the DR these migrant workers are the Haitians. They are extremely poor and will take whatever pay and food comes their way. Unfortunately this means that they often get taken advantage of. Hence why it's a good idea to buy fair-trade when possible to ensure that all the workers and growers are being paid fair wages. So enjoy the coffee photos.