Why Coffee?
More and more, consumers want to know where their food comes from. Farmers want to understand where their product is sold and who buys it. Sustainable Harvest has been transparently connecting the global coffee supply chain since 1997, changing the way the global trade is done. Sustainable Harvest is a specialty coffee importer that impacts the lives of more than 180,000 coffee growers in communities across Latin America and East Africa.
Opportunity for Change
Approximately 25 million smallholder farmers in 70 countries depend on coffee for their main source of income, and yet the majority of these farmers struggle to earn a sustainable livelihood. Historically, these growers have faced a debilitating cycle of market disadvantages. Coffee is prone to the price volatility of commodity markets, and its price often falls below what farmers need to recuperate production costs. Farmers often have little or no access to credit and lack information regarding market pricing and quality standards. Also, the coffee supply chain has traditionally been segmented and anonymous—farmers often have little idea where their coffee is sold and no assurance that the middleman who buys their coffee this year will ever come back and buy it again.
There is a growing demand among roasters for specialty coffee—high quality coffee often recognized for its specific origin—while, on the other side of the supply chain, there are thousands of growers searching for higher-paying markets. Sustainable Harvest is in a unique position to create partnerships among the two. This attention to quality, regional coffee flavors, and environmentally sound coffee production makes the specialty market a place of growing opportunity for Sustainable Harvest to make an impact.
Creating a Better Trade Model
With its new paradigm called Relationship CoffeeTM, Sustainable Harvest created a system to ensure that farmers earn living wages and that everyone in the supply chain has a more sustainable business. Our approach builds direct, transparent market linkages for coffee growers while investing in training and management systems to improve their ability to realiably deliver high quality coffee to roasters.
In communities that depend on their natural resources, sustainable coffee production can be an empowering route to an economic livelihood that also incentivizes environmental stewardship. And in rural, often poor regions, farmer cooperatives often provide an important source of health, education, and financial services.