Our Own Farmer Organization

This is a guest post by my colleague Paul Alvarez.  Paul has been supporting independent smallholder farmers in Peru to achieve Fair Trade certification.  He wrote this post after his latest visit to Peru. “Yes, other certifications are good, but we also want Fair Trade. Yes, we have other certifications but we like Fair Trade …

A first step towards farmer organizations

During my visit to Honduras, last month, I visited the Cruz Alta community in Santa Rosa de Copan. I visited Efigio at his farm where the other farmers in his Fair Trade group were already meeting. Efigio is a young independent smallholder that grows coffee just as his parents and his older brother do. He …

Farm workers in Nicaragua prepare for Fair Trade

Last week I visited a farm in Nicaragua participating in our coffee pilots to bring the benefits of Fair Trade to coffee pickers and other farm workers.  As part of the new standards we are testing in this pilot, the farm workers have democratically elected a Fair Trade committee.  The committee in this farm includes …

I met Eliover in July when I visited the farm where he works in Colombia. He has worked in coffee since he was a kid picking coffee during the harvest, cleaning weeds, and recently guiding other workers in this farm during harvest time. When we met we talked about the idea of Fair Trade with …

working with independent small farmers in Colombia

“It is excellent. We learn from them, they learn from us, and we solve our questions together” Nancy Garces, a leader of the Las Aradas community and part of the Fair Trade small-scale farmer committee in Nariño, on her experience working with the other communities Close to the Doña Juana volcano in Nariño, Colombia, 100 small-scale …