The Coffee Farmers

Today's blog is about the coffee farmers. I will not talk about their working conditions, i will not talk about their poverty, their plight, the problems facing them, i will not talk about their exploitation or why they striked, i will simply talk about my people; because that is what they are.

A few days ago, someone sent me an email with simply one line ''Warum machen Sie sowas?'' (why are you doing this?). To someone like me who grew up in an English speaking country, this might sound outright rude. I kept thinking for days, had i misunderstood his question? or was it just the german bluntness? ;) and he had no ill motives behind his one lined question?
To answer his question i decided to write this article, less i misunderstood / misjudged his question and not only for him but for all the ''coffee people'' out there.

First, it’s important to realize that coffee is a globally traded commodity just like oil. Actually, coffee is the second-most traded commodity with oil being the first. However, for many of the world’s 25 million coffee farmers, coffee is a labour intensive crop that frequently yields very little financial return. 
To fully understand how the pricing of coffee works, one needs to know the Coffee Price Economics.What variables drive up and down the coffee prices?- this is where my Macroeconomics text book written by Japheth Osotsi Awiti from the School of Economics at the UON comes in handy! Anyway today is not the day for coffee economics lessons.- for that class i would need you guys packed and ready with your big mugs of caffein-laden concotions.
But because i understand these variables, and some of them are speculations or 'unexpected factors' (this is where the Key to everything lies), thats why i do what i do.....

Back to my people; Anyone who is my age or plus or minus 10, and comes from a coffee growing community grew up picking coffee. It was all we did, if we wasnt busy slidding on the muddy gullies of River Chania, or planning our next excursion to the nieghbour's Quava and Mango farms.
We picked the cherries come rain or sunshine! we qued for endless hours at the delivery stations or at the mills, to have our black gold weighed and graded after hours of back-aching hand sorting process. But we waited and endured because we knew that the coffee despite all the struggles we had, somehow paid for our school fees ( even if it meant being sent home for half of the term), it put meals on our tables- even if it was the traditional ration of 96% dry maize and 4 % beans with the Muhika leaves that grew wildly and our mothers picked on the coffee fields-at the same time picking coffee.

And then, we grew up...and most of us left for the big City, armed with hope and determination to change the poverty situation among our families back in the village, and we left our parents and the rest of the siblings picking coffee......

So many things have changed since me and my agemates grew up ...the Republic of Kenya got a new constitution, and powers were devolved to county levels which saw a lot of rapid and in some cases misguided changes in the coffee sector, but what happened to the coffee farmers?...

my father planting new coffee seedlings in march 2013

Many of them grew old and could not continue tending their coffee farms, many of them felled down their coffee trees and simply continued with subsistence farming of maize and beans, many of their children dropped from school for lack of school fees, and me and my agemates who were lucky enough to leave the villages left and some of us swore never to step our feet back to those god forsaken coffee fields! and those who remained had no hope of ever coming out....and some of them held on hope that one day all will be fine, they continued toiling on the coffee fields from dawn to dusk... .thats is what happened to the coffee farmers and their families.

And you ask why i do what i do? i do it because i know only too well the challenges faced by these communities, i do it because we are not a charity organisation walking around in Europe with photos of poor african children with mucus running down their noses to beg for your hard earned money!, i do it because i believe the economic sustainability of the coffee producers begins when they are given the business tools and knowledge resources to make a livable income, i do it because with this journey i will secure the future of my village for generations to come.......

And to the Importers and Roasters who somehow found it in their hearts to boycott buying the coffee of my people this season simply because it was not going through their favourite Exporter, i want you to remember my coffee farmers, i want you to simply forget the politics involved ..i want you to have those farmers in mind when you make your decisions...let those farmers THRIVE.......

Henstedt Ulzburg Project Coffee is now in Real

Having spent the whole day with the pupils from Hartenhoolm Primary School ( thats another blog altogether) i headed to the Real Supermarket in Henstedt -Uzburg where one of our project coffees had just been listed. I needed to remind the community of this small town in the north of Germany that our coffees were / are not just coffees...our coffees have a story to tell and we can trace our coffees back to the small village farms back in the country of my birth, where it was produced....to us coffee is the future of my people. We know the names of our coffee producers, we know how many children each of them have, we get to know when their homes ''smell onions'' (insert a big loud laugh) as my brother Zackie calls it.....you see, all of them are my family.I played with their kids on the gullies near the Chania River....we qued together at night at the coffee milling stations to deliver our produce..our parents still toil the land together....

The Henstedt-Ulzburg coffee is one of the Project Coffees that we have available in the German market.We create partnerships between our coffee producing communities in Nyeri Kenya and the coffee consuming communities in Germany.We believe in TRADE and not AID for the development of Africa....thats is the only way my people can learn, thrive and grow towards self-reliance.
When we opened our doors a year ago, we believed in Partnerships and Transparency...Our story is real, share our story..

And of course my Partner, whom me and my people will always be grateful to, the one person whom and his daughter are now part of our Kedovo ; Chania family was there to share the moment and spend the afternoon with me, Mr Heinz Papenhagen of Sandtorkai HandelPapenhagen.I still remember the day we met....its the day the wheels of change turned for the coffee growing communities of the Mt Kenya and Aberdare mountains.....i will give you the story about that day one day..( it was one of those ''bad hair days'' and bad weather days in the town of cold churches ;)

with Partner Heinz Papenhagen

 This ''super lecker kaffee '' as my German friend Stefan calls it, is roasted by our Connie of the De Koffieman Roastery in Lilienthal.Its available as Ground coffee and Crema whole beans. The coffee is available on sale at the Henstedt Ulzburg Real Supermarket, Edeka Markt in HU, The Shell Petrol station in Henstedt-Rhein and at the Rahmer Bookshop on the main steet in Henstedt-Ulzburg.

With these steps, we know now and my community now believes everything is possible....

Dispatch from Wilstedt

So today i headed to Wilstedt in the wee hours of the morning after 2 strong cups of Chania Coffee. 

Wilstedt is a municipality in the district of Rotenburg, in Lower Saxony, Germany.

I was to spend the day with two of the people who whole heartedly support our work ; Nicole Boedtger of Sandtorkai Handel Papenhagen and Cornelia (Connie) Dotschat of De Koffiemann Roastery.

These two amazing women understand that i do not just sell coffee but that my mission and vision is to make sure that my coffee producing community take control of their lives through a sustainable model that fuels the money back to these communities and stimulate growth out of poverty.

Both of them understand that we do not need to conduct various ''researches'' or whatever in the coffee sector- we simply want to do an alternative form of trade that has the power to revolutionize the economy and income of these communities as well as illustrate that  our partnership can work together to provide a tangible difference in many farmers lives... 

''Women Power''

We spent the day at '' Die Olivenöl-Abholage 2014 Messe'' doing what we know best- Selling cofffee.

There is no better day or gift than spending it with somoene who understands my community's efforts behind every bean of coffee that we import.

And we sold...knowing that every packet we sold, every cent we made was/ is a tangible ''investment'' in a far off remote village nestled on the slopes of Mt Kenya and The Aberdares...the village of my people, the village where i was born.

I continue with my journey, a journey that will secure the future of my village for generations to come.

For all our Kenyan coffee lovers, you can buy this great coffee roasted by Connie either by dropping at her Roastery in Lilienthal or by ordering online at her E-shop De Koffieman- hashtag Kenya.

Tomorrow, we get ready to close the deal on the shipping our second container this year...there is more than hope.

Signed Soni.

Sustainable Coffee Farming in Nyeri

The word sustainability in the coffee sector gets thrown around a lot and i can assure you it has 1001 meanings----the answers all vary depending on whom you are talking to! On one side are my friends from Environmental conservation talking about ''shade grown or bird-friendly' coffee cultivation ( dont get me wrong, i have nothing against them! hej thats another story) well not forgetting my 'kumpels' at Fair Trade, UTZ, Rainforest Alliance just to mention but a few! ......
On the other side of the murky Chania River waters are my coffee producing communities
,my people whom from dawn to dusk still toil on the coffee fields so they can put a meal on the table, take their children to school, they basically live from one coffee season to another- Sustainability to them have to carry a whole load of Economic aspect in it.....to them sustainable coffee means hiyer yields, and bringing their families out of poverty.

One year ago when i first told my father that we was going to farm environmentally, economically traceable coffee sought by western consumers, he believed in me. His watery eyes told it all...he spoke to the other small-scale farmers and we all know now as a community that the future is brighter.

My community agreed to adopt sustainable farming to boost our production, and me and the crew would get down to work to ensure that their lives became stable. We decided to use sustainability as a holistic approach to the coffee supply chain...... our communities had suffered through the decades, and if they continued suffering that would affect the quality and supply. Enough was enough, we was to work only with Transparency to enforce trust levels for the coffee producers and the consumers in the western world.

Today the Kedovo team in Kenya who are responsible for the training and capacity building for the coffee producers towards sustainable farming, spent the day at one of the tree nursery assisting the farmers obtain new seedlings in readiness to the next phase of planting more coffee bushes inorder to continue with our pilot project of organically cultivated coffee.

the gang making sure the coffee seedlings are inorder and ready for replanting especially with the ongoing heavy rains.

We continue planting more coffee in the knowledge that our farmers will have a decent income and a future in growing coffee.

We continue our journey ( not marked by distance and its not a voyage) in the coffee world . Our journey is towards sustainable produced coffee that has in mind fair prices paid to the communities who labour so much to produce it.
The words fair prices mean a lot to us at Chania coffee and Kedovo because we are children of those coffee producers. Our journey is all about how our village will put strength in numbers policy and we will all come out strong....
We continue planting more coffee..

Education for Sustainable Development

Last week saw our Kedovo team in Kenya and our amazing group of Kedovo Volunteers from Bayreuth University of Germany spend a day with the school children of Karindundu Primary School in Karatina Nyeri- Kenya.

School children Karindundu Primary

The team visited the school, to continue and facilitate our Rural development projects on Education for sustainable development for the children of our coffee producers.
This particular project at Karindundu has been made possible by two amazing people i met along my journey in the coffee world.....Nicole Boedtger and Heinz Papenhagen of Sandtorkai Papenhagen Handel of Germany. They believed in us and my people and we will always be grateful. 
Our partnership with Sandtorkai will ensure the children of the coffee farmers from Karindundu wet mill ; Barichu Cooperative- will have access to books, and other learning materials as well as attend classes- We all know its a long journey; - my mother taught me that the only hardest thing in the world is that what has not been started.
This step is one of the many that we will take- but there is hope.

Danke Schön Fam.Papenhagen

This particular project on Education has a deep place in my heart. Growing up my father struggled to put me through school with both my siblings...it was not easy.

Three decades later our coffee producers still struggle to put their children to school!
Our work is to ensure that these children remain in school and have access to education as well as good learning environment.

''Education is the most powerful weapon that you can use to change the world''

-Nelson Mandela-

This is our inspiration and motivation! and we believe through this project we will change the lives of our coffee producing communities- may the force be with us......

Trade Fair 'Henstedt-Ulzburg ist gut'

The motto for this Trade Fair in 2014 was Nachhaltigkeit, and where better to find us!! :D
Sustainability is a word both my world understand, its one upfront word we use in our campaign with the communities who produce our coffee. No we dont 'sing' the songs of certifications this and that...

For us its very important that our people produce coffee that is within the ecological , economical and social limits that respect the crop and the farmers. We want to ensure abundant supplies of high quality coffee in the long-term; while at the same time asuring our consumers that the standards and social and environmental practices have been followed by each and every farmer in our project......At the same time we lean heavily on the economic part of it..hej! those farmers have been poor long enough! For us the real proof of a business is that it leaves something over the long term for society.

The trade fair saw us also launch ( due to demand) a new addition to the line of our products:

Chania Dark roast: This is a great coffee roasted by Tolga of Quijote at 210 degrees F for around 13-14 minutes. The coffee is a real morning kicker from the community of Karindundu in Karatina and it has high notes of Chocolate and Caramel. The coffee is currently available on our Online shop, both Beans and Ground coffee, packaging 250g.

At the fair we met amazing people and gathered a lot of information regarding sustainable development projects, information which ofcourse we will share with you our amazing family!

It's Official!!! Kaki-Kahawa

I am extremely excited to announce a new addition to our project coffees!
Kaki- Kahawa ( Kaltenkirchen Kaffee) is now available in the house officially!

Kaki-Kahawa Project

This has been facilitated by an amazing group of the 'Fair Trade Initiative Group Kaltenkirchen' and the ''Eine-Welt-Laden'' of the VHS Kaltenkirchen.
The coffee will be available for sale as from tomorrow 21st Feb 2014 at the 'Eine Welt Laden' of the VHS Kaltenkirchen am Kretelmoor 40. The coffee is available in both Roasted Beans and Ground coffee.

For the Kaki-Kahawa fans who cannot make it at the VHS, one can also buy the coffee from our stand at the Kaltenkirchen Wochenmakt every saturday from 07:00 hrs to 12:30 hrs.

Every purchase you make of this coffee will go towards supporting the amazing Kenyan coffee producers from Nyeri and their families.

To learn more about our community development work, please check out the website of our foundation Kedovo e.V