Progreso UK

Mr Poet wins July's Dog of the Month

Mr Poet is July's winner! He recieves a bone from the Organic butchers and Helen his owner wins a bottle of blue nun!

Mr P said

"I really am honoured, I've been visiting Progreso for a while now and can't fault their Dogocino's. Many cafes underestimate the power of the K9 pound. I'm really pleased that the Progreso growers get a fair price for their beans and chunk of my doggy pound"

Guido visits Honduras

“WITHOUT COFFEE THERE IS NO TOMORROW”
NOTES FROM HONDURAS

Day 1, Thursday 26th of June, 4.30PM, entrance of the Copan Ruins, archaeological Mayan site, north Honduras. After a long trip across Costarica, Nicaragua and Honduras using a long strain of local buses… Laura and I finally arrive, right on time at the place where the mythical coffee growers of Honduras will pick us up and will bring us away to the mountains for four days.

As a “fair trade coffee” maker, I really look forward to this meeting. The main motivation of my work out there in London has to do with these cooperatives of coffee growers, who, through “La Central de Cooperativas Cafetaleras de Honduras”, partly owns the shop which I work for and provide us with the coffee we sell.

So here we are, on the edge of the road, waiting for someone to come, as agreed a few weeks ago. But… nobody comes!
We have some telephone numbers, which I call – only to understand that the person who was supposed to pick us up doesn’t know anything about us. I feel helpless on the telephone; my Spanish is not good enough for coping with this. Result: we are stranded!

Day 2
After a night spent in a local hotel, thinking of things like “but do these coffee growers really EXIST?”, early in the morning I manage to call Jimmy Navarro, the representative of La Central in Europe, in the Netherlands. He talks about some misunderstandings, and he reassures me that someone will show up soon, and that everything will run smoothly from now on.

A disruption of this kind to our visit to the coffee growers would have been irremediable in Europe. There, nothing can go wrong, and if it does, it would leave a sense of bitterness which would be difficult to overcome. Here, it may be easy to get a logistic detail wrong, as much as it’s easy to fix it. After half an hour an apologising Nelson Guerra will pick us up, and from that moment, the overwhelming friendliness and hospitality of the members of the cooperative Coagricsal and of the local people, will make us forget the initial sense of abandonment.

We are guests of the Cooperative Coagricsal, which is one of the 73 cooperatives that are part of La Central. This cooperative works very closely with La Central in Tegucigalpa, because the so-called “Beneficio”, La Central’s dry mill where the coffee beans are processed before they are exported, is close to La Entrada, a town in the cooperative’s area. Nelson brings us there. A security guy at the gate draws my attention for two reasons: printed on his hat is the slogan of La Central, “Sin Cafè No Hay Manana” (without coffee there is no morning / tomorrow), which for me, so far, has been only the slogan of Progreso, the company I work for. Second, he holds a big rifle. I’m more surprised by the former than by the latter. Honduras is ridden by criminality, and you find security workers with guns even inside normal shops.

Nelson passes us over to Wilson, the secretary of the cooperative, who will be our full-time guide during the next couple of days.

Wilson is a primary school teacher in the morning, and a voluntary activist of the cooperative in the afternoon. He’s also a small coffee producer, and he’s very keen to explain to us both the production process of coffee and the work of the cooperative. His Spanish is clear enough for us to understand, and our speaking skills improve quickly to allow, thanks to his patience, meaningful conversations.

He drives us along a bumpy and unpaved road up to the mountain village of Naranjo. It’s a steep rise to the green mountains, far away from the “civil” world of shops, cars, and tourists. The landscape is beautiful; the dense vegetation hides the small villages and the coffee plantations. I expected these to dominate the landscape, in a quite aggressive way like the tea plantations I saw in Asia, but they are actually hidden by taller plants and trees. I learn that coffee is not always grown this way. Shade-grown coffee is valued by formal certification because it reduces the need for fertilisers and promotes biodiversification.

Naranjo is one of the thousands villages in the mountains of Honduras that were created out of the initiative of little coffee farmers. Coffee is the only reason of existence for these villages. The income of coffee production is supported by other minor crops, and, very importantly in recent times, by temporary immigration of young men to the United States. Every family is a coffee producer, and all of them have recently become members of the cooperative. In the past few years they have been badly affected by both the fall of international prices of coffee, and their lack of bargaining power against buyers – middlemen who sell to multinational companies. Not only they suffered the plunge of international prices to the lowest levels ever, but they also got their crops paid for much less because of middlemen taking advantage of their position of strength. The cooperative offered the farmers an alternative, in terms of: ability to bargain the coffee prices collectively, planning of the production, guarantee of sales, help in transporting the coffee and in processing it, technical assistance, training and help in addressing the quality and the process of certification of the coffee (fair trade, ethical, organic, sustainable, shade-grown, rainforest alliance).

In Naranjo we take part to a meeting where Wilson addresses the members of the cooperative about the project of setting a wet mill in the village. It means that the first stages of the process of the coffee beans – pulping, fermentation, washing, first drying - will be handled to a small factory. This, in addition with the support of the dry mill in La Entrada, will make the work of growers further cheaper and more efficient. The meeting is very participated, almost all the audience intervene with questions and comments. It really feels like they are all actively part of the cooperative. And they are proud of it. I can also tell by the enthusiasm they show to help Wilson in guiding us through the coffee plantations. I’m introduced to them like the “one who works in their ‘cafeteria’ in London”. They are fully aware of the challenges that La Central is taking on their behalf to cover the links of the supply chain in order to get a fairer price for their work.

We show them pictures of the Progreso coffee shops in London – it’s clear that they don’t really have a clue about London, coffee shops, etc., but they understand the main idea: these shops belong to them, and they look excited and proud about that. I feel very proud as well to be part of that and to be working for them.

They are very keen in showing and explaining what their job is about. After the meeting, about ten of them accompany us to see some of their “fincas” – coffee plantations – and their machinery.

The cherries are green at this time of the year, and this is the time for maintenance work on the coffee plants. From September/October, these plantations will get crowded, as legions of harvesters will start to select the mature cherries. They will go through each plant once, and then 3-4 times more during the following months in order to pick up the cherries that mature afterwards.

I can see there is a great emphasis on the quality of the production process of the coffee beans. Despite what I heard about the negative impact of the crisis of the international prices of coffee on the quality of the product, it seems that the path chosen by the cooperatives of La Central has been to invest in quality rather than in quantity. Therefore, they chose to put pressure on growers on the quality of their product, rather than on producing more. The ability to negotiate a better price with the importers is reinforced by this emphasis on quality. After all, even the ability to meet the criteria required by organic and fair trade labels is about the quality of the production process.

Day 3

The morning after, Oscar Serrano, manager of the dry mill at La Entrada, guides us through all the machinery and the stages of the process of the coffee beans before they are ready for export. I’m puzzled in seeing so many processes, so much professionalism and technical competence involved.

First of all, every single bag of beans is sampled and tested by professional “cuppers”. We talk to one of them. He went through years of specialist studies to get this job, and he explains us the complex range of faults he has to identify in each sample of coffee beans. Beyond a certain – very limited – amount of faults, he has to order the refusal of the beans from the farmer. Then, he has to roast these samples and “cup” them – to see if there are faults which are not recognisable by sight, and which can be due, for example, to mistakes in the use of fertilisers, or in the fermentation process.

After that, the beans are dried, either with a machine or in a patio. Then there is a complex process of sorting by density and by colour, that allows separating small, undeveloped, broken and otherwise defective beans. The last “run” of the beans is over a rolling surface, where two rows of workers check the beans one by one. After this final selection, the beans can be bagged and stored. Finally, the final product is, again, sampled and checked by the cuppers.

A similar process of sampling and testing, Oscar explains, is made by the importers, before a similarly sophisticated roasting process begins. Then it’s up to the barista to keep up with the high quality of the product – and this makes me think of how often the laborious job of processing coffee beans is easily wasted by unskilled and uncaring baristas. All my fussiness about grinding, preparing the espresso shot, milk steaming and pouring techniques, after all, makes a lot of sense.

In the afternoon Wilson drives us up to Hermitaño, another village in the mountains. This time it won’t be just about visiting fincas and learning about growing coffee. It will be about staying with the local people and passing a night in a “coffee village”. Wilson introduces us to few people, and then he drives off. Oscar (a different one) brings us around the village and the surroundings, talking about how young men, including him, have been forced to look for some income abroad, i.e. Belize or the US, during the past decade and before the cooperative system consolidated. The nice thing is that people really love their place, they are proud of it, and they want to keep living there in the long term. They see the States only as a money-making short-term solution, not as a promised land.

Our host is Rosa, whose husband is temporarily in the US, and whose children are very keen in playing and interacting with us. She serves us a meal based on beans, rice and tortillas. We are offered delicious coffee, straight from the family’s finca and home-roasted by Rosa herself. Even small children, in xxx, drink coffee several times a day. The electricity is off tonight: we enjoy the local hospitality at the light of candles.

Day 4

Early wake up. We feel part of the place by now, and we are very reluctant to leave. But punctual Wilson picks us up and drives us to La Entrada.

We are alone again – it’s a long bus trip to the capital – Tegucigalpa. The scenario changes but we can’t stop thinking of the friendliness of the people of the village.

Day 5
Morning visit to La Central offices in Tegucigalpa. Jimmy welcomes us – we met him the night before for a dinner. He’s recently been appointed as director of La Central, and he’s planning to move back here from Holland. He gives us an overview of the activities, the offices and the people working for the organisation.

Here, few missing components of the puzzle come together to give me a better view of the whole picture.

Tatiana Lara, Jimmy’s assistant, explains us the political side of La Central’s activities. In the worst years of the coffee crisis, they have organised peaceful demonstrations of protest, which were violently repressed by the police. They have been lobbying the Honduran government for an integrated national coffee policy, that provides the industry with investments, infrastructures, expertise and technical assistance, financing, regulation of the market, creation of a fund for price stabilisation, promotion on the international market.

We are shown a video about La Central, where at some point images of the Progreso shop in Covent Garden appear, and it is explained that, with this achievement, La Central has reached the last link of the supply chain. I can finally understand, clearly, Progreso from the coffee growers point of view and this makes me feel very happy to contribute to this project. Also, Jimmy explains me how the initial input to set up Progreso came from him and La Central, and how they’ve been lobbying Oxfam and Matthew Algies for years to make it reality. Oxfam and Algies are just the intermediaries, the support organisations in the UK (and, of course, the investors). Progreso is stuff of the coffee growers.

This is what I wanted to hear.

It’s time to leave now. It’s so hard to leave this country and this beautiful people. But, they need me to get back to London to do my job and to sell a lot of coffee!