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Digging into Dominican Republic
From October 16th to 23rd, 2011, members of Cooperative Coffees traveled to San Cristóbal, Dominican Republic, to visit Coop Polo and Coop Neiba, members of FEDECARES. FEDECARES was born out of the necessity to rebuild the coffee regions after the devastating Cyclone David hit the Dominican Republic in 1979. In 1983, 60 different community associations came together to form the regional structure known as “Federacion de Caficultores de la Region Sur” (FEDECARES) – which was legally recognized in 1991. Since then, it has grown to include 134 associations in 13 different provinces, serving more than 6500 members.
Present on the trip were EJ Dawson from Coop Coffees, Dan Bailey from Amavida Coffee, and Lee Wallace and Brian Steehler from Peace Coffee. The objectives of the trip were wide ranging as we sought to make our volunteers’ vast expertise and wealth of knowledge as useful as possible to Coop Polo and to Coop Neiba! A few of our objectives were to share knowledge about Fair Trade standards, to learn about and evaluate development challenges both in the community and on farms, to exchange information on current challenges in the fair trade market, and to share knowledge about quality control and about marketing.
We visited Coop Polo, a successful cooperative that appeared to be well organized with good leadership in place. Polo also appeared to have a strong technical program and good communications with their producers. Their farms were well tended, healthy, shaded with a strong diversification program. Polo also has a strong pre-financing program in place to support their cooperative members. Unfortunately, high interest rates hinder their ability to borrow funds to carry them through the harvest season and they are put in a position to sell coffee at domestic rates in order to address cash flow.
Each cooperative visit broadened our understanding of the challenges small-scale farmers continue to face in order to secure a stable and economically viable market for their products. Lack of timely and adequate pre-financing continues to be one of their biggest obstacles to developing their markets. This lack of access to credit to pre-finance coffee purchases leaves farmers stuck in a vicious cycle of debt with local lenders – who tend to offer credits early in the production season at high interest rates in exchange for a certain amount of coffee at harvest time… negotiated in advance at below the current market exchange prices. In today’s highly fluctuating international market, this leaves farmers at extreme risk.
We donned our white lab coats to do some cupping at FEDECARES’ new quality lab, we visited Polo’s wet mill and dry mill, and had a look at their entire production process. We were able to see some great work and make some useful recommendations for how the coops can improve.
Overall, our recommendations were very well received. We discussed with the cooperative the difficulty of having two different approaches for the local market and export market. The local market has a much higher tolerance for a high number of defects; therefore the approach from collection through processing is oriented toward volume. The export market, however, is far less tolerant of defects, and so when export grade coffees begin to be harvested, Polo switches toward a quality oriented approach to collection and processing. It is difficult to communicate this switch in approach across the chain, however. Though we acknowledge that this is a balancing act, a recommendation was made to the coop to begin to place greater care on the quality of their coffee regardless of stage of harvest season. Both the cooperative and FEDECARES reported that they were pleased with our recommendations and they anticipated beginning to implement some of them during the current harvest season!
