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Female Coffee Growers Find New Freedoms in Peru
Article
By Sadie Hoagland - Feb 08 2006
In Peru, female coffee growers have partnered with a U.S. import
company to market their own brand of organic, fair-trade coffee. In
addition to gaining more economic control, the women are finding their
work is changing their culture as well.
NUEVO YORK, Peru (WOMENSENEWS)--Her hands move methodically down the
branch, raking the red coffee cherries into the basket around her neck.
She moves to the next branch, demonstrating the work of harvesting
coffee. Watching her dexterity and strength, one would never guess that
Rosa Cantalina Sanchez is 66 years old.
Glades Valencia, 14, is doing the same thing, running her hands down the branches as if she were braiding hair.
Sanchez and Valencia represent a life's work of coffee growing in
northern Peru. Even though many of the region's farmers have attained
"Fair Trade and Organic" certification in order to grow higher premium
beans, the most a coffee-farming family can hope to make is $1,200 a
year, and only $400 in poorer areas.
The average annual per-capita income for this region is about
$1,300, according to the Organic Products Trading Company, an import
company based in Vancouver, Wash., that works with the growers. That
level of poverty describes about 68,600 families in northern Peru who
together produce 49 percent of Peru's coffee--about 273.2 million
pounds--almost all of it grown for export.
In a rural, male-dominated society, the high level of poverty
translates into special problems for young women, who are more often
sent to the fields instead of school and who are married off as early
as 12 to lighten the family's financial burden.
Sanchez is one of the 60 percent female majority of the rural,
coffee-working population of Peru. For years she worked 10 to 12 hours
a day during coffee harvest, only to receive whatever money her husband
decided to give her after the coffee was sold. The fair trade co-ops
have traditionally been a man's world supported by women's sweat, but
in Peru things are changing for Sanchez and hundreds of women like her:
They are demanding their own profit from their labor.
A Women-Owned Brand
In 2003, over 400 female growers in northern Peru decided to start
their own coffee brand. They called it Cafe Femenino and made it a
specialty coffee that would raise global awareness about the harsh
gender inequality that the coffee workers face.
The growers sought the help of Isabel Uriarte Latorre, a Peruvian
woman who, with her husband, has helped the country's agrarian
communities for decades by showing cultivators how to form co-ops that
can maximize their income and lead to local infrastructure
improvements, such as roads.
Latorre, in turn, sought the help of Gay and Garth Smith of the
Organic Product Trading Company, a coffee-importing firm that has a
long-standing relationship with the growers in Peru. They agreed to buy
the coffee, import it to the U.S. and sell it to their roasters.
Now, 60 roasters in the U.S., Canada and Australia willingly pay an
extra two cents a pound over the purchase price to contribute to the
women and to the Cafe Femenino Foundation, which focuses on the women's
economic development. Roasters agree to donate an additional 2 percent
of gross sales to the project or to a women's crisis center near their
homes, and a woman in their business must sign the Cafe Femenino
contract.
Cafe Femenino goes a step further than simply putting a fair-trade
label on its coffee, which indicates that it has been certified by the
Fair Trade Labeling Organizations International in Bonn, Germany. The
nongovernmental organization makes an independent consumer guarantee
that the coffee has been bought at a fair, non-exploitative price from
the farmer. This standard has been globally set at $1.39 per pound,
which can be up to $1 above the market price for coffee.
Traditional Roles Are Changing
Women in Peru are traditionally seen as workers and mothers, not as
decision-makers or landowners. "It is part of the culture that women
are just for having children," Latorre says, estimating that the
average woman in the most impoverished Cafe Femenino communities is the
mother of seven.
In order for a woman to join the co-op, she must show that her own
name is on the deed to the land she works. Since the coffee income is
greater with the Cafe Femenino fair-trade program--the women make about
17 cents more per pound, or about 30 percent more than the average
coffee farmer--it benefits the whole family, a persuasive argument for
the husbands to cede land to their wives.
Latorre also sees to it that the money generated by Cafe Femenino
is given directly to the female farmer. Another portion--the income
from the two-cents-per-pound surcharge--is devoted to the co-op, for
all the women to determine how it will be spent.
Cafe Femenino sent its first shipment in August 2004. Those 19,000
pounds of coffee brought in $27,000 to the women's co-op. The first
year's extra income has been invested in coffee production, but the
psychological effects of the higher income are already rippling through
the communities. Now women are meeting together independently to talk
business, and the men are not preventing them from doing so.
Talk of Revolution
One such meeting takes place at dusk in the high mountain village
of Nuevo York in Amazonia. Balloons hang brightly across the small town
green as part of a celebration for the Smiths who have returned for
their second visit. As a lively band plays Peruvian dance music, the
women gather around Gay Smith and Latorre. They talk of needing more
training in organic farming methods and better communication among
themselves and with other Cafe Femenino growers across the Andes.
"We need to get into high schools and understand markets, we want
to reclaim our rights as women," says one female grower, Santos Vasquez
Dias, 57.
While the meetings are all about business, facilitators hope that
the conversation will eventually expand to social needs. Latorre, for
her part, already perceives a decrease in household violence. "Women
are not being treated as badly," she says. "Men have more respect for
women."
Smith notes how much more organized and confident the women are
now, compared with her visit last year when the growers--even though no
men were present--would hardly speak in meetings.
This year a few men stand at the edge of the circle with arms
folded, as if guarding something. But the women ignore them; they want
the men to be involved and to benefit from this project too. But it is
clear that this time, they will be in charge.
Sadie Hoagland is a freelance writer based in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Original Article Published at: http://coanews.org/tiki-read_article.php?articleId=644
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