CHAPTER THREE

YOUR LATTE CAN IMPROVE LIVES

How Coffee Fuels Economic Development

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Humanity runs on coffee.

—UNKNOWN

Eerie acoustic music—the soundtrack from a popular snowboarding movie—plays overhead at Cuvee, a coffee shop located in a former post office in Austin, Texas. A few people sit around the industrial-looking space, working on laptops or chatting; others are at the metal counter outside in the sun. They’re all drinking one of the coffee shop’s two daily offerings, custom brewed by an earnest, tattooed barista while you wait. She grinds and weighs the beans in a small countertop machine made by Baratza, then deposits them into a premoistened paper cone fitted into a glass Chemex carafe. Hot water flows over the beans from a black contraption that looks like an arched banker’s lamp fitted with a special showerhead-like sprayer designed to uniformly wet the beans.

Two cards on the counter offer intel about the beans: “The care with which the mother/son team produce their coffee,” one of the cards states, “is unlike anything we have seen. The mother, Bedhatu Jibicho, is eighty-five and has been growing coffee her entire life. We hope you enjoy the fruits of her labor.” There are also tasting notes for this brew from Ethiopia: “Banana, peaches, and honey.”

You can also grab a cup of the pre-brewed Spicewood blend, a mix of Central American beans. Cuvee has its own roaster in the Texas Hill Country and retails beans sourced directly from farmers in Ethiopia, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Colombia. The company also wholesales to the grocery chain H-E-B, Whole Foods, and other coffee shops around town.

Austin has a reputation as a foodie town, but you can go to coffee shops like this across the country and meet baristas and owners who similarly pride themselves on knowing the origins of the beans—in cities from Boston to San Diego and Atlanta to Zanesville. Your local roaster might have a personal relationship with specific farmers, or only offer beans that are certified organic or fair trade. You can also order coffee online that has been vetted by half a dozen popular certifications, each of which guarantees that these beans have been grown according to specific labor, environmental, and/or social requirements.

I love coffee—the taste of it, the routine of it, the variations. I love how going out for coffee is a bonding experience. I love how it’s part of so many people’s days, at pretty much every income level. My devotion to coffee started back in high school. The all-nighters I pulled were partly fueled by whatever cheap, canned coffee I could find. I’d often get up before dawn to bike to Tom’s coffee shop near the school, joining the factory workers who also started their day at Tom’s. I’d install myself in a booth with a toasted blueberry muffin and an endless cup of coffee, poured by Tom himself, who always made me feel supported while I studied. (I’d sometimes get up and pour coffee for other customers as a study break if he got busy.)

In college at Georgetown University, my love for coffee increased along with the workload. During the end of my junior year, I started working at the U.S. Department of State during the day, taking night classes to complete my degree. I’d followed after my father both in going to Georgetown and in working for the government while in school. I admired him so much and wanted to model his industriousness; I definitely relied on daily (and nightly) coffee infusions to keep up the pace.

As an adult, when I travel through places like Nepal and India to visit workshops and aftercare facilities, I always bring along packets of micro-ground instant Starbucks. I never want to get stuck facing an energy meltdown without coffee. Tea and soda don’t do it for me, and it’s not hard to find hot water and a cup!

After I started To the Market, I gained a whole new appreciation for coffee because of its robust supply-chain transparency. Coffee has one of the most transparent supply chains of any commodity in the world—and certainly more transparency than is available when shopping for apparel and accessories. This transparency is a model for what I want to see happen in the artisan industry and in the retail supply chain as a whole.

The artisan industry, the second-largest economy in the developing world, simply doesn’t have the meaningful, consistent connection between the producers and the consumers that exists in the agriculture sector (the most significant commercial activity in the developing world). In the artisan space—and the retail apparel, accessories, and home goods industries—there’s been less investment in programs to improve the lives of workers and to protect the environment, and less demand, to date, from consumers for ethical sourcing. I find this frustrating, but I continue to look toward coffee as a guidepost for where the fashion industry can go.

Coffee is something many of us rely on and spend money on daily, without fail. Exact consumption numbers are hard to pin down, but globally, we consume something like six hundred billion cups of coffee a year, and that number is growing as people in China and India become more devoted to the wonder of our daily brew. It’s produced by people living in some of the poorest regions of the world, in a band on both sides of the equator, basically between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn. More than 25 million smallholder farmers grow coffee throughout Latin America, in Africa and Asia, and 125 million people rely on the coffee industry for their livelihoods.

Coffee helps so many of us remain optimistic in the face of real troubles, or in the pursuit of our own dreams. In one study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, women who drank four or more cups of coffee a day were 20 percent less likely to be depressed than study participants who weren’t downing so much joe (a stat that makes perfect sense to us serious coffee drinkers).

I sometimes buy coffee multiple times a day. And I’m not alone in this level of commitment. In the United States, we spend $40 billion on coffee each year. Is coffee at least partly responsible for the remarkable energy and ingenuity of American business? I’d say, “Yes!” Because of its popularity and supply-chain transparency, coffee is the easiest way for so many of us to use our purchasing power for good.

THE COFFEE-ADDICT-IN-TRAINING STARTER KIT

Just in case you need more encouragement to sit down and have some coffee, here are the basic tools to get you started.

Coffee Scoop: Digging out coffee grounds—or deciding how many scoops should go into each pot—may be more of an art than a science, which is why having a coffee scoop that is a piece of art isn’t a bad thing. Some of my favorites are those long enough to reach the bottom of the bag, like the wooden scoops made in Guatemala (and sold online at places like Farmer to Farmer or One World Projects). Some people insist on a copper scoop for flavor purity; U.S.-based coffee roaster Stumptown Coffee Roasters sells a great version crafted in Japan.

Brewing: French press or automatic drip? Pour-over or stovetop espresso maker or Nespresso mini or Keurig? The debate rages in the coffee-drinking community. Different forms of preparation have pros and cons, including how long it takes to brew (French press loses); the taste, consistency, and control (pour-over wins); how long you need it to stay hot (drip with warmer pad wins); and ease of use (Keurig or Nespresso wins). I like Grosche’s Dresden eco-friendly French press, made with 50 percent recycled plastic material and packaged with 50 percent recycled paper. Enthusiasts also swear by the simple design of the Chemex glass pour-overs.

The Right Mug: It’s hard to beat drinking from a good old-fashioned ceramic mug. Papillon in Port-au-Prince makes nice-to-hold mugs of Haitian clay, many adorned with encouraging words, such as hope and strength. For a cup on the go, I like Homeboy Industries’ insulated metal tumblers with lids, printed with phrases like Jobs not jail and Kindness is the only strength there is. A non-branded, microwave-friendly option is Aladdin’s Transform travel mug, made of recycled plastic and available at Target.

THE POWER OF POPULARITY, AKA “THE STARBUCKS EFFECT”

When I’m traveling, I am always excited and often relieved to spot a Starbucks nearby. I’m a longtime fan of Starbucks, but in recent years, I’ve definitely met coffee lovers who will avoid the corner Starbucks because it’s owned by a large corporation. They’ll even cross the street to go to a local shop instead. I support the desire to invest in local entrepreneurs, of course, but as it relates to coffee, Starbucks has been a supply-chain game-changer.

Almost everyone in the coffee industry—from growers in Guatemala to coffee sellers and experts in the United States—credits Starbucks with popularizing the idea of spending nearly two dollars on a cup of coffee and paying attention to where the beans were sourced. I delight in this fact because I enjoy drinking Starbucks and because, as anyone who has stood in line for a tall vanilla latte can see, Starbucks proves it’s possible to source ethically and remain a business success for decades. These wonderful, quirky, independent coffee shops around the country—charging far more than the fifty cents I paid at Tom’s coffee shop in high school—are thriving, in part, because Starbucks has created a demand for high-quality coffee. A whole supporting industry of coffee accessories and brewing paraphernalia has also sprung up as a result of the market for high-quality, ethically sourced brew.

Starbucks always had an interest in ethical sourcing. In the 1990s, it joined forces with Conservation International (CI) on a project in Mexico that has wound up improving the coffee crop, and farmers’ lives, around the world.

Conservation International is a thirty-year-old nonprofit whose mission is to protect the planet for those who live on it, both humans and other animals. In the late 1990s, CI was working to protect a critical area of biodiversity in Chiapas, Mexico, on the southern tip of the country, bordering Guatemala. The region had been designated by UNESCO’s Man and Biosphere Programme as a critical area of biodiversity. CI was looking to encourage low-impact agriculture in a protective buffer zone around the reserve because without economic opportunities for people who live near protected lands, environmental initiatives can falter. As Bambi Semroc of Conservation International explains, resentment can build if you protect land or animals instead of people rather than with people. “I saw this when I was a Peace Corps volunteer in northern Togo,” she says. “People were forced off their land to create a protected area, which created animosity. When democracy happened there, the people went into the park and killed the animals in retaliation.”

Coffee is a great crop from an environmental perspective, because it can grow in the shade of other, taller trees. Coffee trees can be planted underneath the existing canopy—basically by thinning the forest rather than clear-cutting it. Other types of farming rely on clear-cutting massive swaths of forest to plant crops, which damages the environment in a number of ways. Coffee farming seemed like a perfect buffer zone activity in Chiapas because the region already had a tradition of shade-grown coffee under old-growth, native trees.

CI launched a project to increase coffee production in Chiapas, then sought opportunities for the farmers to sell their beans to roasters who valued good environmental and social practices. CI reached out to various roasters and coffee companies. Starbucks was immediately interested in the story, and had a big market. But when the “cuppers” tasted the coffee from the beans, they found the quality lacking. Instead of abandoning the idea, Starbucks worked with CI to improve the coffee grown by these farmers and, along with it, the farmers’ income.

The Starbucks team taught farmers in Chiapas better harvesting and processing techniques, such as picking only the red, fully ripe cherries. Coffee actually comes from a fruit—a round, pulpy berry about the size of a grape, called a cherry. Fully ripe cherries are usually bright red or a deep burgundy (though some can be yellow or orange). Beans inside ripe cherries have a far better flavor than those picked when the cherries are unripe or only partially ripe. The cherries themselves have a surprisingly delicious, sweet flavor, a little like watermelon crossed with rose or maybe passion fruit. You never see coffee cherries because the real kick (and value) is in the beans—two hidden inside each cherry.

Starbucks also helped the farmers choose the best postharvest technique, which really impacts the final flavor. There are a few different ways to handle the postharvest of coffee beans, but the main distinction is between dry and wet processing. With the dry method of processing, freshly picked cherries are spread out on a huge surface under the sun and turned throughout the day for several weeks, until the moisture content drops to 11 percent (and the cherries are shriveled like raisins). The beans are then removed from the dried fruit.

With the wet method of processing, the beans are removed from coffee cherries right after picking by a huge pulping machine. The beans, still covered in a slick mucus, float down a series of water channels and through rotating drums—like a Disney Splash Mountain ride for coffee beans. Then they are fermented for twelve to forty-eight hours, rinsed, and dried under the sun, on drying tables, on mesh platforms, or in large tumblers.

The Chiapas program was a huge success. Starbucks began buying from Chiapas and then working with CI to replicate the project around other critical conservation reserves. They began projects in Peru, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, and Indonesia, adapting the best practices to each country. Eventually, the Starbucks team realized it needed a standardized set of growing, harvesting, and drying practices, leading to the creation of Starbucks’s own coffee-verification program, called C.A.F.E. Practices, in 2004. C.A.F.E. stands for “Coffee and Farmer Equity” and is a system of growing guidelines based on principles similar to other certification programs, such as fair trade and Rainforest Alliance. More than a million farmers and coffee workers have participated. By 2015, Starbucks verified that 99 percent of its coffee was ethically sourced.

CERTIFICATIONS

WHAT’S BEHIND THE LABEL

There are a handful of certifications today signifying that the coffee (or chocolate or snack food) you’re buying was made sustainably—but their exact meaning can be unclear to consumers. The fact that these labels exist has real value; while they all signify slightly different things, each one guarantees that the seller or manufacturer is trying to source in a way that protects farmers’ livelihoods and the environment.

Most certifications require a third-party auditor to inspect the farm and processing facility. This can be a thorough investigation that ties up everyone involved for a week and requires showing records of things like seed sources, soil conditions, and weed and pest management approaches. Certifications are also a way for coffee bean brokers to differentiate between lower-quality beans and something special. These certifications enable farmers who follow the requirements to ask for a higher price for a superior product. (One important exception is “all natural,” a marketing phrase that isn’t tied to any actual certification program.)

Below is an explanation of the most common certifications you might see on a bag of coffee.

Bird Friendly: Coffee from Latin America that is grown on farms providing a good habitat for birds, as in, not clear-cut land.

C.A.F.E. Practices: Starbucks has invested more than $100 million in improving the social and environmental impact of coffee growing. This includes its own verification system called Coffee and Farmer Equity (C.A.F.E.). C.A.F.E. is not a seal you can see on the bag but a behind-the-scenes way for Starbucks to establish and monitor good growing techniques and pay farmers more for them. This includes providing farmers access to capital, support services, and even carbon-reduction programs. Some other companies also will pay more for the high-quality, C.A.F.E.-verified beans.

Direct Trade: This means coffee was sourced by the roaster from the farmer, without middlemen. The theory behind direct trade is that the buyer and seller have formed a mutually respectful relationship, agreed on a fair price, and avoided losing profits to a third party or obscuring the origin, as happens with commodities. It’s a growing movement in the coffee industry, as evidenced by the little handwritten cards describing the farmers’ lives at Cuvee and the full-color photos of farmers on the walls in so many Starbucks locations. With a single-element product like coffee beans, a company such as Starbucks or the 110-year-old New York–based roaster/wholesaler/retailer Porto Rico Importing Company can buy directly from the farm or farming community.

It’s much harder to do direct trade, at this point, with artisan goods. An artisan group in Kampala, Uganda, for example, could theoretically produce products directly for Macy’s, but they need help with quality control, tagging, and meeting Macy’s workplace standards. These needs are part of why there are so many middlemen in fashion, and why a group like To the Market is needed to bridge the gap.

Fair Trade: Many consumers have heard of this certification, which is primarily focused on empowering small-scale farmers and producers who lack the bargaining power of large corporations. These small farmers can be vulnerable to accepting whatever price they can get for their product, from whoever happens to come along. Rob Everts, co-executive director of Equal Exchange, the oldest and largest 100 percent fair trade coffee roaster in the United States, explains it like this: “Our purpose on this planet is to reform trade. We want to inject equity wherever possible, and to level the playing field between desperate rural farmers and buyers in the U.S. and Europe.” Equal Exchange, which started in 1986, does about $70 million in sales today. You can buy Equal Exchange coffee, chocolate, and other products online and in stores across the country.

You’ll find fair trade labels on everything from coffee and chocolate to clothing and home goods.

The Germany-based Fair Trade Labelling Organizations International (FLO) was established in 1997. The U.S. branch of FLO is called Fairtrade America, but you’ll also see “Fair Trade USA,” a splinter group based in Oakland, California. All fair trade standards are designed to tackle poverty and empower producers in the world’s poorest countries. To get either label, producers must have democratic decision making and a say in how the fair trade premiums are invested. There must also be social programs in the community, decent wages, freedom to form unions, no forced or child labor, and adherence to health and safety standards. The fair trade environmental aspect looks at factors such as minimal and safe use of agrochemicals, soil fertility, and water resources, and no use of GMOs. Farmers can get an additional premium for organic growing.

Fair trade has a long history, and it’s fascinating to read about. It’s getting some pushback today from people who think the acceptance of large tea plantations into Fair Trade USA has watered down its mission. Some craft chocolate makers say the fair trade certification has limited value because it doesn’t indicate anything about the quality of the cacao beans. Still, both the Fair Trade USA and Fairtrade America labels mean that a third-party, independent auditor has verified that the coffee (or other product) was grown or produced according to a set of standards governing the trade relationship between the farmers and traders.

Rainforest Alliance: This international nonprofit network of farmers, foresters, scientists, governments, environmentalists, and businesses is dedicated to conserving biodiversity and ensuring sustainable livelihoods for the people working the land. To get the label with the little green frog, a farm must comply with ten standards of the Sustainable Agriculture Network (SAN), including ecosystem conservation, wildlife protection, and fair treatment and good working conditions for workers. If you see the seal, you can rest assured that this coffee (or other product) was grown and harvested using environmentally and socially responsible practices.

USDA Organic: If you buy a bag of Peet’s Coffee, you’ll see a round logo printed on the front that says “USDA Organic.” Small print on the back reads, “Certified Organic by QAI.” What does this mean? A lot, it turns out. The United States Department of Agriculture Organic stamp is the federally established protocol for growing and/or processing crops, meat, and packaged foods. To be USDA Organic, a farm can’t use synthetic pesticides or fertilizers or GMOs and must be inspected every year by a third-party auditor authorized by the federal government, such as QAI—Quality Assurance International, a San Diego–based company established in 1989 that is one of the largest certifiers in the world. A USDA Organic farm must follow organic guidelines for three years before getting the round label; for coffee farmers, this means transitioning to all-organic growing (if they’re not already doing so) and being able to provide proof of this history for three years.

With meat, organic regulations require animals to be raised in decent conditions that respect their natural behaviors, such as grazing land in the case with cows. Animals must be fed 100 percent organic food and be raised without antibiotics or hormones. Processed foods can’t contain artificial preservatives, colors, or flavors and must have organic ingredients (though there are some approved nonagricultural ingredients in certain foods, such as enzymes in yogurt, pectin in fruit jams, and baking soda in baked goods). A packaged product that says, “Made with organic ingredients” must have at least 70 percent USDA Organic certified content.

UTZ Certified: This certification program, launched in Guatemala in 2002 by a Belgian Guatemalan coffee grower and a Dutch coffee roaster, aims to increase the amount of coffee being certified globally from both small and large farms. UTZ certification also applies to cacao, tea, and hazelnuts. To become certified, suppliers have to follow a code of conduct focusing on good farming methods, working conditions, and environmental sustainability. Although many people have never heard of UTZ, it’s currently the largest certification program for coffee and cocoa in the world. UTZ merged with Rainforest Alliance in 2018 with the goal of establishing and using a shared certification process in 2019.

MAKING COFFEE THE WORLD’S FIRST SUSTAINABLE CROP

Some coffee growers and lovers are worried about the future of our favorite bean because of environmental and market volatilities. Conservation International estimates that hotter summers and changing rain patterns could slash the world’s current coffee-growing area in half. Quality coffee is grown in the mountains, and even if farmers respond to rising temperatures by planting higher, the amount of available land decreases as you get toward a mountain’s ever-narrowing peak. Already, warmer temperatures in the mountains have led to the spread of a fungus called coffee rust. This fungus, which has been attacking the leaves of coffee trees since the late nineteenth century, recently appeared in high-altitude areas that had long been safe due to their relative cold, devastating coffee crops in Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador.

Meanwhile, most coffee beans are traded as a commodity, making farmers vulnerable to market fluctuations. The price of beans depends on supply rather than demand because the demand for coffee basically never drops (an obvious truth to coffee drinkers like me). A new supplier in the market can slash the commodity price for farmers everywhere, as happened in the early 2000s, when the market was flooded with inexpensive beans. Producers in Guatemala, for example, suddenly faced a market in which the cost of growing beans exceeded the price they could command. This devastated the local economy and drove many people out of the industry in search of better-paying work.

Conservation International and Starbucks have banded together once again to fight these threats to our morning cup of joe. In 2015, they launched the Sustainable Coffee Challenge during the Paris climate meetings. The Sustainable Coffee Challenge, which has grown into a huge collaborative effort by private companies, governments, nonprofits, and research institutions, aims to make coffee the first sustainable agricultural product—and to ensure that we’ll have enough coffee to fuel our futures. The program has three arms. One is to improve the livelihoods and economic prosperity of coffee farmers, their families, and coffee-industry workers. The second focus is on increasing productivity to meet future demand. The final goal is to prevent the clear-cutting of even one additional hectare of valuable forest or the depleting of other natural resources for the growing of coffee. So far, more than one hundred partners in more than two dozen countries have committed to the Sustainable Coffee Challenge, including McDonald’s, Walmart, and the Specialty Coffee Association.

In 2016, Starbucks also launched an initiative called One Tree for Every Bag. For every bag of coffee sold in its stores, the company donated the cost of a new coffee tree (about seventy cents) to Conservation International, which then worked with partners on the ground to plant trees in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Mexico. Coffee trees start to decline in productivity when they’re about twenty years old, and farmers need to refurbish their fields regularly to guarantee a good yield and decent earnings.

Starbucks, Root Capital, the Fairtrade Access Fund, the International Finance Corporation, and the Inter-American Development Bank have together committed $50 million by 2020 to something called the Global Farmer Fund. This fund will provide affordable access to credit for coffee farmers and cooperatives, a key component of being able to invest in things like new trees, make changes to meet certification requirements, and market the beans.

COFFEE FARMING IS FOR GIRLS

Because of the decades-long efforts at supply-chain transparency in coffee, you can actually go to a major coffee-growing country like Guatemala and see how your dollar does good. Guatemala, a Central American nation of sixteen million, bordered by Mexico to the north and the Pacific Ocean to the west, produces some of the world’s best coffee, and has long been a supplier for Starbucks. The land here looks like a bunched-up blanket—hills going every which way and steep valleys cutting off towns, making travel difficult. You see an occasional volcano rising up in a perfect triangle, its tip pointing through the clouds.

DRINK UP!

A good cup of coffee is freshly brewed from flavorful beans and enjoyed at a favorite spot, perhaps with a favorite person. But a great cup of coffee also helps make the world a better place. You can harness your caffeine craving for good by drinking at one of these spots.

A 2nd Cup (Houston, Texas): Located where I was born and raised, this coffee shop uses a portion of its profits from coffee to fight human trafficking in Houston, a major hub for international and intranational trafficking in the United States.
bwè kafe (Hoboken, New Jersey): Started by Maryanne Fike and her family, largely in response to the 2010 Haiti earthquake, bwè kafe serves La Colombe coffee and actively supports college education for Haitians through Love for Haiti, access to clean water through Coffee for Water, and Haitian farmer training in partnership with La Colombe.
Blue Bottle Coffee (Oakland, California): Indie favorite Blue Bottle sold a majority stake to Nestlé in 2017 for an estimated $500 million, a sign that the market for coffee with a rich story behind it is in high demand. You can find Blue Bottle in its original state of California or in newer locations across the United States and Japan, including New York, DC, Miami, and Boston.
Camano Island Coffee (Camano Island, Washington): This social-impact coffee company is known for organic beans, shade-grown plants, and fair wages. You can also buy a blend that gives a portion of proceeds back to a nonprofit. My favorite is the Set Free blend, which supports the anti–human trafficking organization Set Free, a To the Market partner.
City Bean Roasters (Los Angeles, California): This 100 percent family-owned, Los Angeles–based coffee shop distributes 20 percent of its after-tax profits to its staff, regardless of position. It also donates all coffee chaff (a waste product of the roasting process) to local farmers and gardeners.
Counter Culture Coffee (Durham, North Carolina): This roaster buys from cooperatives around the world, sells online, and now has training centers that offer Friday morning tastings in thirteen cities. A 2012 Green Plus Sustainable Enterprise of the Year Award winner, Counter Culture runs a sustainability program called SEEDS (Sustaining Environmental and Educational Development at Source) that donates to coffee-producing partners and their communities. The company sells great coffee, including Sipacapa from Guatemala. Counter Culture is also a founding member of the Coalition for Coffee Communities—an organization addressing food security issues in coffee-growing communities.
Fire Department Coffee (Rockford, Illinois): Founded by a pair of U.S. Navy and Marine veterans-turned-firefighters, this Illinois-based coffee roaster sells reasonably priced, roast-to-order coffee online and donates a portion of proceeds to a different firefighter- or military-related charity every other month. Cofounder Luke Schneider says the company grew out of his love for coffee, and his dislike of so much of what was offered at the fire stations. “At the station, there is a lot of what I consider really bad coffee. Mass produced. Sitting on the shelf a long time. Firefighters rely on coffee to keep them going. We wanted to create something that was fresh, enjoyable, and good enough to drink all day long.” Their Original blend is a mix of Central and South American beans.
Starbucks Reserve Roastery and Tasting Room (Seattle, Washington): This upscale version of your corner Starbucks showcases rare coffees. There are locations in Seattle and Shanghai, and stores are slated to open in NYC, Tokyo, Chicago, and Milan. You can also find mini Reserve bars in many existing Starbucks.
Thrive Farmers Coffee (Atlanta, Georgia): This for-profit is transforming the coffee supply chain through an innovative revenue-sharing model that eliminates the toxic volatility of the commodity market. Thrive also minimizes the number of brokers in the chain and maximizes the income to the farmer.

Guatemala is known for great coffee and poor roads. Even the main throughway in the relatively developed southern coast has sections pockmarked with potholes. Smallholder coffee farmers who grow the most prized “strictly hard bean” coffee (brewed from beans grown at least 4,500 feet above sea level) often live in small communities high in the hills, accessed by dirt roads which can be completely washed out in the yearly rains. Many are members of the twenty-two indigenous tribes descended from the Mayans, who retain their traditional ways.

The lack of transportation infrastructure is one reason that many Guatemalans struggle to find economic opportunity and to send their children to school: both can be too hard to reach. Guatemala has some of the highest poverty and lowest education rates in the Western hemisphere, at least among the indigenous farmers living in the remote highlands. There’s a great deal of inequality in Guatemala, and traditionally, most of the vulnerable people live in the rural communities in the hills. Many of these farmers have only one or two acres and are subsisting by growing just enough for their own families, and often not even that.

For Maribel Tojil Sanchez, a mother of two living in Sipacapa, a super-remote community in the western highlands, learning to grow high-quality, certified organic coffee was a game-changer in her life and that of other women in her village. It takes Sanchez about seven hours to get down from the hills of Sipacapa to Quetzaltenango, the country’s second-largest city—a charming, historic, high-altitude place that feels a little like Quebec City with its cobblestone streets, historic stone buildings, and great coffee shops.

On a bright November weekend, just before harvest season in the northern hills, Sanchez traveled to Quetzaltenango to talk about how coffee farming has benefited her village. She was wearing a traditional woven dress adorned with blue flowers and a scalloped neckline decorated with beads, and a Western-style navy blazer buttoned over the top. Her long black hair was curled and pulled back in a ponytail. She had the focused, somewhat fatigued air of someone who is busy and who just took a long journey early in the morning to share her story and her gratitude for the opportunity she’s had.

The impetus to farm coffee in Sipacapa came from an unusual place. For decades, residents looking for work had to travel long distances to other parts of Guatemala, or even Mexico—a common reality for indigenous people in the hills. The need to travel for jobs kept members of this community and others like it constantly moving, isolating families far from the support of their relatives and pulling kids out of school year after year to accompany their parents. More recently, people from Sipacapa and other parts of the country have headed to the United States in search of the far higher wages available for manual labor here. (As of 2017, money sent to Guatemala from relatives working in the United States reached nearly $7.5 billion.)

In 2008, a mining company came to Sipacapa and proposed to buy up all the locals’ land to build a coal mine in it and then hire them to work it. Despite their constant hustle to find work, the townspeople didn’t want to sell to a mine. A neighboring community had done that, and seen a rise in alcoholism and violence. As Sanchez explains it, rejecting the mine felt like fighting for their cultural integrity. “Our culture is not like that. We did not want that. Our culture is different,” she says.

Still, turning down the opportunity of the mine forced the community to take a hard look at their ongoing economic struggles. They needed a way to make more money. Subsistence farming of corn and cows not only made them vulnerable to outside pressures but also kept the community locked in instability, poverty, and illiteracy. Sanchez only had a middle school education because her family lacked the resources to send her to high school. Although the first six years of basic education are theoretically free and mandatory in Guatemala, secondary schools are scarce outside the cities, especially in rural indigenous areas. People often have to travel far distances to continue the basic education that we in the United States take for granted, and many can’t afford the trip. The expenses for middle and high school can make it prohibitive even to those who live near one.

Sanchez, a single mother with a five- and ten-year-old at home, was working all the time to make ends meet when the mining offer arrived. She knew that if she kept going as she was, she couldn’t guarantee that her son and daughter would have any more education or opportunity than she’d had. Many of the people in her village had similar stories.

But what else could they do? They reached out to the local Catholic church for help. The church assisted the community in resisting the mine company’s offer and worked with local leaders to analyze the potential of their land. The conclusion? They could grow high-altitude, strictly hard bean coffee in those hills. The market for high-quality, hand-picked coffee was growing in Europe, Asia, and the United States. The higher price that these beans command could mean far better profits than those available through traditional crops, letting them earn money without having to travel for work.

With the help of a Dutch nonprofit called Solidaridad, the community got training in coffee farming and founded a local association to allow all participating new coffee growers to have a say in their organization and decision making. They decided to raise Bourbon and Caturra, two varieties of the high-quality Arabica beans.

Right away, the local women assumed important roles. Coffee farming starts with making large seed beds in a nursery and tending to the seedlings for a full year—watering them and protecting them from direct sunlight. The community decided that caring for babies—even baby plants—was women’s work. This decision transformed the lives of the women. Working in a plant nursery turned out to be a great vocation for mothers, Sanchez says. It’s less physically demanding than other forms of agriculture, and babies and toddlers can hang out with their moms in the nursery all day. After school, older children can help with the work, watering the plants and learning how to tend them.

When the time came to sell the fledgling coffee trees to locals eager to try coffee farming, the women suddenly found themselves holding real assets. They had raised the plants and they were the ones who earned the profits from the sales, after reimbursing their local coffee association for the seeds. The women earned more money than they ever had before. They suddenly had more economic power, and valuable skills, and soon became leaders in the cooperative—and in the community.

With the help of the same Dutch nonprofit, the Sipacapa community planted its first crop of trees at the end of 2009. It takes about three years for coffee trees to bear fruit, and Solidaridad provided critical economic support during this pre-harvest period. The coffee farmers picked their first crop of coffee cherries at the end of 2011. They joined a larger cooperative called Manos Campesinas, based in Quetzaltenango, that exports beans for organizations of small farming communities. In 2013, through Manos Campesinas, the Sipacapa community exported 11,700 pounds of single-origin, super-high-quality beans labeled “Sipacapa.” By 2016, they had improved the quality of the beans and had more plants in production, enough to ship 160,900 pounds of coffee through Manos Campesinas.

Sanchez says it was hard to get some men to listen to the women in the beginning, not only because of their gender but also because they weren’t proven coffee farmers. But once the community saw the results of their labor, farmers became eager for the women’s input. Sanchez was elected vice president of the cooperative’s board in 2012 and has held leadership roles ever since.

All Sipacapa coffee is grown according to organic certification requirements, a practice that Sanchez says is better for everyone. “You can see the difference now that we’re doing all organic farming. With more chemicals, you stopped seeing the other kinds of plants. Vegetables didn’t grow. Now I can grow tomatoes and lots of other vegetables.”

You can order Sipacapa online through Counter Culture, which buys from Manos Campesinas. If you do, your morning brew directly supports Sanchez, her children, and an entire community that has tapped into the power of decent-paying work to lift itself out of poverty and to help give women more of a voice. Today, nearly a third of the cooperative’s 238 members are women, many holding leadership roles. Sanchez works as a coffee “promoter,” encouraging farmers to plant coffee, showing them how to care for the plants, and instructing them on better growing techniques.

As Sanchez says, “Before, parents would give their money or land to the men. Now it has changed; money and land can go to the girls, too. Now we see women in the local government, as authorities in their community. It’s changed for many reasons, and coffee growing is one of them.”

I love this story because it shows how private business, along with nonprofits, absolutely can transform lives for this generation and the next, and change long-standing gender dynamics.

SUPPORTING SMALLHOLDER FARMERS

Manos Campesinas is a success story itself. Manos Campesinas works with about 1,400 smallholder, indigenous farmers in the highlands of southwestern Guatemala, including areas around Guatemala’s Lake Atitlán. Nearly a quarter of its members are women, including the current board chairperson. The cooperative was founded in 1997, the year after the peace accords were signed, finally ending this nation’s thirty-six-year civil war. The idea of smallholder farmers banding together for more bargaining power had been gaining traction, but during the civil war, these efforts were complicated by the larger Cold War. Indigenous cooperatives could be mistaken for guerrillas and killed.

After the civil war ended, Manos Campesinas got to work in earnest. The cooperative received funding and training from Hivos International and Oxfam, two international independent aid agencies, to help it meet some specific goals. These included having all the affiliated farmers meet the requirements for organic certification, introducing yield-increasing techniques, improving the quality of the coffee so it could compete in the international market, negotiating the best price, and using profits to support member organizations’ specific social and economic objectives.

HOW TO SPEAK GOOD COFFEE

Coffee is an industry with its own language, much like wine. Luckily, picking up a few key words can be enough to get by.

Cupping: This is a term you hear a lot if you start hanging out with coffee producers. Coffee is repeatedly tested for quality and taste. This process is referred to as “cupping” and usually takes place in a room specifically designed to facilitate the process.

Species: The two main commercially grown species of coffee are Arabica, which is generally higher quality, and Robusta. Arabica comes from the highlands of Ethiopia, eastern South Sudan, and northern Kenya. Robusta, from low-lying regions in Africa, is grown largely throughout Brazil and is most commonly found in less expensive, canned coffee.

Strictly Hard Bean: This term generally refers to coffee grown 4,500 feet above sea level or higher. Higher-altitude beans take longer to mature, which translates into denser beans with more robust flavor and a higher price.

Varietal: You’ll hear people use the word varietal to mean “variety” or “cultivar,” but coffee bean purists insist that varietal should be used to describe coffee beans after they have been brewed. A lot of people know the term varietal from wine; a varietal is made from a specific variety of grape, such as merlot, which gives it a specific taste and profile.

Variety or Cultivar: A natural or hybridized subspecies of a coffee plant. Coffee’s flavor is affected by the land where it’s grown, the harvest and postharvest techniques used, and the exact variety of the plant. There is a growing awareness of different flavor aspects of different types of coffee plants. The original varieties of Arabica are Typica and Bourbon. Caturra, which grows throughout Guatemala and has been shown to be susceptible to the fungus coffee rust in the country’s lower regions, is a natural mutation of Bourbon, which was first found in Brazil. Both coffee and cacao researchers hunt for new and ancient varieties the way prospectors look for gold—the goal is to increase the varieties available to improve flavor, disease resistance, and sustainability.

In 1998, farmers affiliated with Manos Campesinas shipped their first container of coffee beans outside of Guatemala—about forty thousand pounds of fair trade, certified organic coffee—to the Netherlands. In 2000, Manos Campesinas began a relationship with the U.S. roaster Equal Exchange, which greatly expanded the cooperative’s market and enabled it to export thousands of pounds of beans to the United States each year. Today, you can buy Equal Exchange coffee sourced from Manos Campesinas online, as well as in some Target stores, and in about three hundred food co-ops and family-owned small food chains.

Within a decade of its founding, Manos Campesinas had become a fully self-sustaining business, no longer receiving any support from nonprofits. The sales director is a hardworking, driven, forty-something Guatemalan named Miguel Mateo. Mateo grew up in an indigenous community in northwestern Guatemala, and learned Spanish as a second language and English as a third. He is dedicated to finding markets that will pay smallholder, indigenous farmers at least twice the commodity rate for their coffee beans. He sees the growing market demand for high-end, hand-picked beans as absolutely critical to improving the livelihoods of smallholder farmers. “Our best partners are small- and medium-sized coffee roasting companies that are focused on quality and have the objective of helping alleviate poverty. These are the most reliable in terms of paying a fair price to farmers even if the market or weather fluctuates,” he says.

How does Mateo convince potential buyers to pay double the commodity rate for super-high-quality beans? He brings them to the farms to see just how much work goes into getting coffee from the tree to the cup.

To visit the farm of Miguel Ajsoc Chacom, for example, a smallholder coffee farmer living near the shores of Lake Atitlán, you have to drive for several hours from Quetzaltenango, then head down a concrete road full of switchbacks in the deep jungle to the charming little town of Santa Clara La Laguna. Like most of the towns around Lake Atitlán, Santa Clara La Laguna is populated almost entirely by people of Mayan descent. The women wear elaborate traditional dress—in this case, beautiful, long, woven pencil skirts with multicolored vertical stripes; wide belts embroidered with flowers; and solid-colored, short-sleeve blouses with square necklines decorated with embroidery and beads. The town is calm and quiet in the steady afternoon sun. While Lake Atitlán is a popular tourist destination, this entire region has maintained its rural character and traditional ways.

You park on the edge of town, then hike uphill for about twenty minutes on a narrow dirt path under the hot sun through low jungle. Dried stalks of corn rise impossibly high toward the piercing-blue sky. Ajsoc Chacom takes this hike every day to tend to his farm. During harvest season, he carries bags of coffee cherries down the hill on his back, or sometimes on a horse.

Ajsoc Chacom is thin and fit, with a deeply weathered face and a big smile. He’s wearing navy chino pants; a long-sleeve, collared shirt; and a navy baseball cap with the Nike logo. He speaks with pride about his farm, giving specific details about each plant, the way you might share your enthusiasm about your own backyard garden with neighbors. He points out the year-old coffee trees, the local avocado species, the temporary shade trees he planted while waiting for the wide-canopied shade tree called Chalum to mature.

“It’s one hundred percent, one hundred percent organic,” he says with a wide smile as he explains how each plant contributes throughout the year—providing shade, making mulch, serving as holiday decorations. He leans against a skinny temporary shade tree, pointing to a six-foot-tall poinsettia tree in full bloom. “My farm tells me Christmas is close. The farm is like an education every day.”

Later, in his small, concrete-floored house, while sipping coffee that is sweet enough to drink black if you normally take sugar, he explains that he never had any formal education, never went to school, “not even for an hour and a half.” He grew up in Santa Clara La Laguna speaking Quiche, his dialect. As a child, he traveled with his family to the coastal plantations where his parents would pick cotton, sugar, and coffee, which prevented him from attending school.

He didn’t learn to speak Spanish until he was twenty-four. Word had gotten around that he was hardworking and smart, and a nonprofit leader reached out to him to help run a plant nursery that the group was starting in the region. When Ajsoc Chacom complained that he couldn’t possibly remember all the names of the plants because he didn’t speak Spanish, the nonprofit employee challenged him, saying, “I do not accept that excuse. If I accept that excuse, I am pushing you over the edge of a cliff.” Ajsoc Chacom decided to learn Spanish, picking up the language simply by listening, because he hadn’t been taught how to read and write. (His wife, who makes herbal remedies for babies in town, still primarily speaks Quiche.) That challenge changed his life, as did the money from the nursery job that speaking Spanish enabled him to keep, and the help of two grown sons who moved to the United States and send remittances back home.

You meet so many people like this in Guatemala, hard workers with obvious natural intelligence and drive but incredibly limited opportunities for education and for work. It’s inspiring to hear stories like that of Miguel Ajsoc Chacom, but also sobering to think of how easily he could have gone through his whole life without these opportunities.

Later, Miguel Mateo talks about another difficulty facing coffee farming—young people giving it up in favor of easier urban occupations or a shot at working in the United States. Manos Campesinas is now focusing on motivating young people to stay with farming by highlighting the real economic opportunities available in agriculture by taking an organic, fair trade or direct trade route and working with buyers who believe in economic development throughout the value chain.

Miguel Mateo also shared his own efforts to get an education. He dropped out of school after ninth grade because his town lacked a secondary school, and his mother couldn’t afford to move to the larger town of Huehuetenango, to the north, where the closest school was. His father had been killed in the civil war, and his mother had to take care of the family on her own. He was able to return to school the following year and eventually, with stops and starts, to finish high school. Six years later, he went to college with help from an educational NGO that partnered with the university, then got the job with Manos Campesinas.

It’s heartbreaking and eye-opening to hear how hard the young (and not-so-young) people in this beautiful, misty, peaceful-feeling nation struggle to get themselves to school. The civil war left about 200,000 people dead, everywhere along the economic spectrum. In many cases, the loss of a parent complicated the already-challenging process of getting to school or supporting a family.

With so many of the success stories, relatively little was required to change the course of someone’s life—whether it was an NGO that helped with school or a nonprofit that offered community training and funding to tend new crops until harvest. The impact of small interventions like these points to how our purchases can have a huge ripple effect in a country like Guatemala. What seems like an insurmountable barrier for so many could be removed with an amount of money that, for many of us, is pretty small.

SPENDING THE BUCKS FROM STARBUCKS

While smallholder farming is an important sector in Guatemalan coffee farming, the country also has plenty of medium- and large-sized coffee farms, or fincas, often owned by members of the same family for a century or more. These larger farms provide steady and seasonal work for thousands of farmers across the country, and their owners also point to the certification process as a key to keeping them afloat by allowing them to differentiate between their high-quality, hand-picked beans and those harvested mechanically in other countries.

GIVE A HAND-UP IN GUATEMALA

Guatemala is a land filled with incredible potential and people who have strong ambitions to create better lives for themselves and others. It takes such a small amount, in U.S. dollars, to turn around someone’s life. Here’s how you can help:

Cover the Cost of Going to School: Help someone start or finish school with nonprofits Mayan Families or the Global Education Fund.

Order Guatemalan Coffee: Order the coffee for your office or home from a cooperative in Guatemala that follows certified organic, Rainforest Alliance, or fair trade practices, or that has a direct trade relationship with a roaster you trust. Check out Manos Campesinas, Kishé’s Woman-Grown blend, and De la Gente Guatemala.

Support Farmers: Donate to VisionFund International’s microfinance or Heifer Project International’s sustainable farming initiatives to help women farmers around the globe, including in Latin America.

Support Farmers’ Children: Donate to Funcafé, the social services fund that is part of Anacafé, Guatemala’s national coffee association. Funcafé focuses on health, education, food, and nutrition for Guatemala’s rural population. A donation can also pay for a water filter, which dramatically reduces disease, and environmentally efficient, safe woodstoves. You can also propose a specific program.

Sponsor a Scholarship or School: The relative scarcity of high schools makes it hard for many Guatemalan youth to continue past sixth grade and makes it more likely that they will start work rather than focus on studying. Funcafé has a “coffee high school diploma,” which includes a high school education and classes on coffee growing. A scholarship could go toward this program or another. You or your company can pay to build a school for those in a rural area through Funcafé.

For Finca Los Andes, a nearly two-hundred-year-old coffee plantation blanketing the southern slope of the Atitlán Volcano, selling to Starbucks has brought stability, higher earnings for farmers, and essential income during the coffee market crash of 2001. In the midst of the crash, Starbucks signed a three-year contract with the finca, agreeing to a guaranteed premium price, enough above the commodity price to enable the farm to keep running. (This contract also helped Starbucks’s business, since it ensured their own supply of beans.) Starbucks again helped in 2011, when coffee rust attacked huge swaths of the finca’s trees. Finca Los Andes pays workers more than they’d earn elsewhere as temporary labor, in part due to the premium it gets from Starbucks for following the company’s C.A.F.E. Practices verification program.

Finca Los Andes has more than one thousand acres, one-third of which are cultivated for coffee, tea, macadamia nuts, and other produce, and two-thirds of which are held as a nature preserve. Although Los Andes is located in the relatively developed southern coastal region, the farm itself is remote, at the end of a very long, unpaved road deep within the rain forest. It takes four hours to get there from Guatemala City, over a twisting, often rutted road. Steep walls of rosy earth rise up on either side, blanketed with dense, low-lying jungle, spilling over with tangled vines. The countryside is intensely green, with very little development outside the main cities, although you do see small communities that have sprung up along the main road, catering to travelers heading from Guatemala City to Lake Atitlán or to the colonial town and tourist favorite Antigua, or on to Mexico.

About an hour west of Guatemala City, there’s a pineapple farm and a dozen pineapple stands lining the road. Drivers pull over for an afternoon snack. They stand in the dirt on the side of the road, biting into dripping chunks of pineapple, the juice trickling down their chins. Everyone in this rural land seems to be working all the time, doing anything they can to generate extra income. You see people carrying wood on their backs, running little roadside tiendas, working in the fields. They’re up early and on the job. In other countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, running late is almost expected and can seem like a point of pride. But in Guatemala, nearly everyone arrives early; a driver scheduled to pick you up for a meeting at eight a.m. may well show up at your hotel at seven thirty. There’s a feeling of constant industry and effort.

COFFEE AND CULTURE IN GUATEMALA

Most visitors to Guatemala head to Antigua, an inland valley town five thousand feet high, ringed by volcanoes, and filled with Spanish colonial architecture from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Antigua you see today was built in 1543 on a grid pattern inspired by the Italian Renaissance. It served as the capital of Guatemala until 1773, when an earthquake destroyed much of the town, inspiring the nation’s leaders to move the capital to Guatemala City. This move left Antigua’s amazing architecture undisturbed for centuries, while the development and modern building trends happened in Guatemala City. Antigua remained essentially frozen in time, which means that today, you can turn a corner and see an incredibly ornate Spanish-style cathedral rising before you, half in ruins, perhaps with a small, bustling coffee shop built right into the structure.

When I arrived in Antigua for the first time, I was blown away by how beautiful the town is, with its cobblestone streets lined by low, painted, stucco buildings, and the way it sits in this valley in the shadow of volcanoes. Every few blocks, you see a massive white stone monastery, school, or a beautiful old church with an elaborate hand-carved facade. The artisan peddlers, dressed in their traditional Mayan woven garb, set up a daily craft market located inside a crumbling seventeenth-century church on the town square.

After doing a little shopping (and stopping for coffee), you can see how coffee is grown just outside Antigua at the Filadelfia Coffee Plantation tour. You can also stay on Filadelfia’s property, which feels more like a Spanish colonial estate than a farm. In town, check out El Convento, a boutique hotel across from the Convent of Capuchinas, a historic convent from the 1700s.

You can also learn about the history of chocolate, a crop grown there for centuries, at one of several ChocoMuseos in town. Hot chocolate was an important ceremonial drink in Mayan culture, and you can taste a version of this ancient drink made with chile and cinnamon.

Quetzaltenango is a less touristy city high in the hills with crisp mountain air, amazingly preserved architecture, and coffee shops on every corner. Quetzaltenango is known for Spanish-language schools, and there’s a student vibe there, with books on international development left on shelves in coffee shops, and late-night restaurants and bars.

Another popular tourist option is to visit the charming Mayan towns surrounding Lake Atitlán. Most of the people in these small towns have retained their Mayan clothing, customs, and language.

In I, Rigoberta Menchú, the classic memoir/group narrative of the indigenous Guatemalan experience under generations of repressive regimes, the author describes the incredible work ethic of the Mayans. Menchú (who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992 for her efforts to promote equal rights for indigenous people in Guatemala) speaks with pride about the fact that at age eight, she could pick coffee beans without breaking a twig and haul pounds of coffee herself. Still, despite this culture of work, there are not enough good jobs to go around.

When you finally get to Finca Los Andes, by cutting through a rubber plantation at the end of a rocky road partway up the volcano, you see low coffee bushes with ripe red cherries growing under the shade of the taller Chalum trees. The coffee cherries at this altitude turn red earlier in the season than they do higher up. A string of simple houses are clustered together about a mile into the property. The finca employs nearly fifty full-timers, all of whom live in these airy, tin-roofed houses with concrete floors, woodstoves, and running water. For full-time employees, housing comes with the job. Because it is so hard to get to, Finca Los Andes is one of the few remaining coffee plantations that still houses pickers right on the farm. It also has a school, health clinic, two churches, and a small store for the farmers and their families. Another twenty-five part-timers come during the harvest to help pick.

The property also has a main house that now serves as an office and occasional lodge for visitors. It’s a long, gracious, ranch-style home built by the previous owners, with wood-beamed ceilings and windows facing a terraced hillside. There’s a huge wooden table in the dining room, and couches and books—as well as a framed copy of the finca’s first contract with Starbucks hanging on one wall. From the back patio of the house, you can gaze out at the mist rising off the Pacific Ocean and feel both the history and the changes happening here. You can hear someone stacking bricks elsewhere on the property, the crow of a rooster, and the rushing of the stream that powers a water turbine generating electricity for the whole estate.

Owner Jim Hazard and his late wife, Olga, bought the farm in 1985. Today, in his mid-eighties, Hazard is soft-spoken and gentle. He’s a Guatemalan of British descent. Hazard still participates in some activities but leaves most of the work to his son-in-law, Jaime Freire. They both live in the old estate house a few days a week, basically camping out in the property; technology allows much of the business to be run from the city.

Los Andes currently sells much of its crop to Starbucks, and both Hazard and Freire thank Starbucks for keeping coffee standards high. “There are not so many Starbucks,” Freire says, speaking about such a large company being so focused on quality and farmers’ livelihoods. “We still sign three-year contracts with them.”

The school for the farmers’ children is near the main house, and a newly planted section of coffee trees, courtesy of Starbucks’s One Tree for Every Bag program, stretches out just past that. Finca Los Andes received twenty thousand new trees of a varietal that has been shown to be more resistant to coffee rust, and earlier that year, planted three thousand of the new baby Starbucks trees in this gently sloped twelve-acre plot. Each new tree went in next to the stump of an old Caturra tree that had just been cut down.

By November, the Starbucks trees were two feet tall, squat, bushy coffee plants with super-shiny oval leaves. It’s amazing to have heard about this promotion at the local Starbucks in the United States and then to see these trees, now a little more than a year old, planted in neat rows under the shade of tamarind trees and skinny, white-barked Palo Blanco trees that resemble Dr. Seuss’s Truffula trees.

Work begins early on the finca for both the farmers and their families. On a Friday morning in November, about thirty children sit in the two-room schoolhouse, grouped in “learning teams” of five students each around old, wooden teachers’ desks painted pale pink and mint green. Colorful poster-board projects hang on the walls, and books line a shelf in the corner. The building itself is like a large garage—concrete block walls, tin roof, and open windows without screens. But the atmosphere is warm and supportive. The huge front door remains open all day, offering a view of the lush, green hills. The kids can hear chickens in the distance, someone sawing wood, the bark of a dog. They may even catch a glimpse of their parents walking by. A hand-hewed picket fence painted in bright primary colors, like crayon sentinels protecting the learners, surrounds the school property.

The school also has a chicken coop and vegetable garden. This garden contributes to education and health. Vegetables are not traditionally a big part of the Guatemalan diet, and the idea here (also popular in the United States) is that growing green things can help get kids excited about eating them. The kids cultivate the onion, pepper, cabbage, and bean plants and collect the eggs from the little amber-colored chickens every day. They sell half the eggs to the on-site market to pay for chicken feed, and eat the rest during the school day.

The school is partly funded by the finca and partly supported by Funcafé, the nonprofit arm of the country’s national coffee association, Anacafé. Funcafé provides books, teacher training, and guidance on what should be included in a recommended, nutritional ten a.m. meal.

The typical indigenous diet of corn and beans lacks a variety of nutrients—and these days is often “supplemented” by packaged junk food. Seven out of ten children of Mayan descent still suffer from malnutrition—even if they’re not hungry—because of this deficit. Malnutrition contributes to stunted growth, lowered immunity, cognitive delays, behavioral problems, and learning difficulties, all of which can impair school performance and limit future job opportunities. Funcafé helps families learn to prepare and eat more balanced meals.

The kids at this farm school look healthy; they’ve already had their ten a.m. brunch and seem eager to start learning. They’re dressed in clean, matching white-collared golf shirts with the school’s logo and jeans or skirts. In addition to their balanced daily meal, they are also visited at school by a full-time paramedic who serves as the community doctor. He teaches the children basic hygiene, delivers babies in the community, tracks the health of the workers, ensures that everyone has taken the annual pill that protects against river blindness, and runs an on-site clinic.

A second, smaller room at the school is reserved for the first graders. Sitting at one of the low tables are two sisters from the highlands, Bima and Rosalia. Bima, aged eight, has a round face with a smattering of tiny freckles and big, wide-set eyes. She’s quick to smile and sits leaning forward, watching the teacher. Rosalia, age ten, has long, shiny, black hair braided in a thick rope that she wears to the side. Both sisters jump up when asked to perform a song they’ve learned, excited to share something they know.

Most of the kids their age are in the larger main room, but these sisters sit with the first graders because they had no schooling until their father got a job at the finca. Their parents, Pablo Gutierrez and Felipe Alvarez, come from a small, rural community about seven hours away in Quiche, a mountainous region that is considered the heart of the K’iche’ people. Neither Gutierrez nor Alveraz ever attended school.

As an adult, Gutierrez found work as an itinerant picker of coffee and cotton, and the entire family would leave the village every year for his jobs. At one point, he landed steady work at a big farm, but there was no school nearby, and the one in the next town was too far. The bus cost about $40 US per month, which was three-quarters of his take-home pay after expenses. So the girls didn’t go to school.

Gutierrez tried to get to the United States twice in search of better-paying work. He was so desperate for work that he sold his own small farm in the highlands, using the money to pay a smuggler or “coyote” to help him cross to the United States. He was caught by border guards in Mexico and sent back both times. After his second failed attempt, he had nothing left. He found work at Finca Los Andes as an itinerant picker.

Gutierrez is an industrious, consistent worker. Freire got word of his strengths and hired him as a full-time employee. This meant a house, and all the services the finca provides. Moving to the farm—which requires workers to send their kids to the free on-site school—provided his daughters their first-ever chance to learn.

This is exactly the kind of social change that can happen through ethical purchasing, and it’s so exciting to see. If you buy a cup of Guatemalan coffee from Starbucks, you are directly helping to support the teachers sitting with the kids at this school and others like it. The finca gets an even higher price from small, independent coffee roasters who buy its highest-quality, higher-altitude strictly hard bean coffee. A cup of Guatemalan coffee from Coffee Emporium in Cincinnati (or through their online store), from Coffee By Design in Portland, Maine, or from your room in some Radisson hotels also contributes to the lives of this nation’s families and future.

Funcafé’s budget comes from grants and annual fees that Anacafé collects from all affiliated coffee producers in Guatemala. This means that you are helping these kids and others like them basically any time you buy Guatemalan coffee from anywhere. This is especially true when you pay a good price to a roaster who is ethically motivated or to a coffee shop offering certified or direct trade Guatemalan coffee.

Coffee is the largest provider of jobs in Guatemala’s rural areas, and some finca owners like Freire see a thriving coffee industry as the best way to encourage Guatemalans to stay in the rural areas and in their own country. “It’s better to stay here, in my opinion,” says Freire. “You have a simple house, a school nearby. Better than moving to the city where you have one room and maybe a job far away and a school in a dangerous area.”

On Saturday, the Los Andes school is open, and several teachers are administering an exam to the older kids. One of the exam administrators, a short, confident-looking young man named Nelson Ruiz, grew up on the farm and attended the school himself. His sister is one of the main teachers during the week. Ruiz finished one year of college. “I’d like to do more, but it costs a lot of money,” he says, a common refrain among people young and old in Guatemala.

That day, Bima and Rosalia are at home with their parents and their two younger brothers. The house is quite modest by American standards, but Bima and Rosalia’s mom says she’s grateful to have wood, electricity, and running water to be able to wash the clothes. A lack of steady housing with basic amenities like clean water can make it hard to take care of a family and contributes to diseases that sap nutrients, another factor in malnutrition.

Alvarez holds her hand in front of her mouth as she smiles, covering her missing teeth. She and her husband have been here nine months and still seem to carry the weight of their struggles with them. Gutierrez says he hopes to stay put until all the kids are eighteen and have finished school. “I want the girls to make up for the lost time,” he says.

CALIFORNIA COFFEE: THE NEXT NEW VARIETAL?

While coffee plants have historically thrived only in countries straddling the equator, one coffee entrepreneur in California is trying to change that. If you dream of buying a 100 percent made-in-America cup of joe, coffee-preneur Jay Ruskey, the first commercial coffee grower in California, has the answer.

Ruskey owns a forty-two-acre farm high in the hills above Goleta, an agricultural region two hours north of Los Angeles. For the past fifteen years, Ruskey has been refining coffee farming in California. In recent years, he’s begun training other local farmers in organic, hand-picked coffee growing. His company, Frinj Coffee, sells farmers the trees, consults with them on growing and picking, and buys the beans to ferment and roast himself. He envisions a California coffee-growing region as robust and award-winning as the state’s wine industry. Sound impossible? So did the idea of vineyards blanketing the hills of California years ago.

“You’re not supposed to grow coffee in California. You can’t do it,” says Ruskey, pointing to the stout coffee plants with their thick, shiny leaves and bright red cherries covering his hillsides. “I’m a disruptive technology.”

His farm is perched high above the Pacific, past deep green, rolling hills. Coffee plants grow in rows in the distance, red-earth pathways winding in between. The farm also grows avocados, dragon fruit, passion fruit, and caviar limes. It looks like Shangri-La, an idyllic, fantasy kind of place. Shaggy-frond Washingtonian palm trees rise up beyond a small lake near the tasting room, where Ruskey and his wife, Kristen, welcome visitors for occasional scheduled tours and tastings.

At one such tasting, held during harvest season, a half-dozen coffee tourists sit on stools at a raw wood counter, listening as Kristen explains the coffee-making process. They also touch plants, sip coffee, view equipment, and taste the coffee cherries fresh from the tree. A few branches lie on the counter. One type has cherries so red they’re almost burgundy, while another variety has orange cherries that look like shiny kumquats. Coffee cherries have a jelly-like consistency and delicious flavor. Each cherry has two pale green coffee beans inside. The farm’s roaster, a shiny metal barrel with a huge funnel on top, sits quietly in a corner.

The air up here is cool and amazingly clear—an ideal climate, Ruskey insists, for coffee. It’s far cooler than nearer to the equator and has some very rare frosts and a fog that blankets the hillsides on summer mornings. Much like wine grown in the northern regions, California coffee has a unique flavor profile, due to the longer time it takes for the cherries to ripen in this cooler clime. Cherries sit on the trees for about a year up here, which can be twice the growing time near the equator. The harvest season here is between May and September, varying slightly each year due to climate patterns. Then the beans dry for one to two weeks and are stored until they are roasted, ideally within two to eight months of harvest.

The higher labor and land costs mean California coffee does not come cheap—at least not yet. Efficiencies in the postharvest process should help bring the price down, though Ruskey’s aim is to produce the highest-quality coffee feasible, not low-priced, commodity-traded coffee. “In my perfect world, we’re doing it in the best way possible, and this will help reduce the price,” says Ruskey.

As is the high-altitude, hand-picked, organic coffee in Guatemala, California coffee is part of the specialty coffee market. What this means is that you’ll pay more but will be supporting sustainable agricultural and economic practices that benefit farmers and help forge the development of a new U.S.-based agricultural product. Creating new growing regions is another way to sustain the industry into the future. Ruskey hopes to create a California coffee brand and maintain tight quality control to ensure that consumers will ask for it by name, the way a wine lover might ask for a chardonnay from Napa Valley or a pinot noir from Sonoma County.

Ruskey insists that every high-end cup of coffee helps create more awareness of what goes into coffee generally. “I think it brings light to the fact that this is a process that takes the work of many people. It’s raising awareness of how much labor goes into coffee, that there are farmers in this chain, and that their lives and livelihoods matter. We take a farmers-first approach. We’re focused on our farmers and making sure they get a good wage and are rewarded for doing good-quality coffee.”

Reliable employment with a conscientious company, and the school and health services that come with it, are the turning point out of generational poverty for this family. Bima and Rosalia, who are staring out the window as their parents talk, and their two little brothers, who are by now bouncing on the bed, are like kids anywhere. Stable work for their parents gives them a chance to grow up with the comfort that comes from not having to worry about where they’ll sleep, when they’ll eat, or how to get an education.

I see the growing demand for high-quality, sustainably sourced coffee as a percolator of food security and educational opportunities for families like those in Guatemala and around the world. It also helps bring the self-esteem that comes from dignified work. A core part of To the Market’s business model is the belief that economic opportunity creates independence and personal agency, and this connection is easy to see with coffee.

Coffee is also central to my own personal daily functioning. Most mornings, I speak to our director, Danielle, and our COO, Jill, during our nine-thirty call. It’s three hours earlier in California, where Jill lives. We’ll be setting out the day’s priorities, and Jill will often say, “Okay, I’ll get to that after I’ve had some coffee.” Danielle and I are usually two cups in by then. Knowing that our coffee habit helps send girls like Bima and Rosalia to school adds an extra kick to my morning brew.

HOW TO BREW A PERFECT CUP OF COFFEE

At Good Land Organics coffee farm in Goleta, California, trained cuppers use a pour-over system for tastings because it allows for the hottest water and most control over how the water flows through the grounds. Here’s how to be your own cupper.

Grind your beans immediately before brewing.
Moisten the paper filter by pouring hot water over the entire thing and letting it drip through. Discard the water.
Pour hot water in the carafe to preheat it. Discard the water.
Place the coffee grounds (2.5 tablespoons for just under two cups of water) in the filter.
Heat water to 105 degrees Fahrenheit, then pour a small amount on the grounds to allow them to bloom.
Pour the remaining water slowly and consistently over the grounds to allow them to continue to swell as the coffee drips through into the carafe.
Serve!