If you’ve been out and about in north-east London over the last few months you may have spotted a very handsome, custom-built bicycle-come-coffee-machine saying on it: “Freshly roasted cloud forest coffee: Supports communities, Protects forests, Tastes of Adventure.” The coffee dispensed there can be traced right back to its point-of-origin: one of eight tiny one hectare family farms in the stunning Amazonas region of northern Peru.
The man behind this venture is Conrad Feather, an anthropologist, indigenous rights activist, NGO founder and former colleague of mine who lived in Peru for many years, including various stints in an indigenous community in one of the very remotest regions of the Amazon. Here he tells me, via email, about how his coffee business works and how he got into it:
DH: Before we get into some of the details, let’s start with a broader question. What makes your coffee so special?
CF: The easy answer is the people and the place. The valley where the coffee is grown, called Chilchos, is paradise. The range of altitude means you can grow potatoes on the upper slopes and pineapples on the valley floor and all of it lies in the heart of what looks like an endless sea of impenetrable cloud forest. There is no road access, however, so get to London our coffee beans must come out on the backs of horses - a 48 hour journey through forest and over a stunning 4,000 metre-high Andean pass. And that’s just the start of an epic journey. The residents of the valley are amongst the hardest workers I’ve ever met. They know the lack of a road helps to safeguard their valley from destruction, but it also comes at a cost - a lack of access to markets and healthcare which means they have to work doubly hard to earn a living. Having said all that, what I think makes this coffee so special is the approach we’re taking: our starting point is not to maximise profits but to see if we can use coffee to support people to protect their forest homes. The more coffee we can sell, the more forest our farmers can protect.
DH: So it’s what you might call “cloud forest-to-cup” coffee! The first time I travelled through that part of the world I was absolutely wowed - one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen. But how did you initially get into this? How did you first meet the farming families you now work with?
CF: I met a guy on a bus! I’d been living in Peru for about five years and was travelling to the Amazonas region with the intention of trying to get to this magical valley I’d heard of. The man’s name was Jota and he was returning to visit his relatives. He told me his Dad wanted to sell a small portion of land and so he offered to take me there. I jumped at the chance. That was 2006.
DH: What was it like when you got there?
CF: It was even more enchanting than I had dreamt of and the people bowled me over with their hospitality, humour and creativity. They lived almost entirely from their farming and were incredibly hard-working and frugal, but they also delighted in the abundance of their sub-tropical valley - food was plentiful, the water crystal clear, the soil deep and rich, and the forest provided so much. People worked hard but also had lots of leisure time to play football in the village, carve sculptures out of tree ferns, and design wonderful flower-filled gardens around their houses. It felt like paradise and I was hooked. Jota’s Dad offered me a small patch of forest to buy and I formally became part of the community over the next year. Over the next 10 years, I went back and forth to the village building relationships and a house!
DH: That’s an amazing story. So. . . when you arrived was there someone already growing coffee, or was that your idea?
CF: They had been growing coffee for many years primarily for their own consumption, but just before I got there a local NGO had started supporting farmers to grow coffee commercially as part of a vision to protect the forest by providing an alternative to rearing cattle.
DH: Of course, rearing cattle is one of the biggest drivers of tropical deforestation, particularly in Latin America. By the time you arrived there, had quite a bit of forest been cut down for cattle?
CF: Yes. If you travelled from Chachapoyas - the capital of Amazonas - most of what was once forest had been cut down. The deforestation was much less in Chilchos, which I had fallen in love with and had been partially deforested for rearing cattle and agriculture, but it was restricted largely to the immediate vicinity of people’s houses and smallholdings. Just a kilometre away was an endless panorama of forest. Of course, cattle were - and are - vital to people’s lives. Their milk and yoghurt are an important source of daily sustenance and more importantly they act like a kind of banking system. Cattle are kept not really for their meat, but as a way of storing value to cash in on in times of great need like a health emergency or the need to build a new house.
DH: Let’s come back to what you said about the NGO supporting families to cultivate coffee as “part of a vision to protect the forest.” That’s really significant to highlight because, although coffee drinkers in countries like the UK might not realise it, coffee is a big deforestation driver, particularly somewhere like Peru, a global top 10 coffee exporter. Can you explain just how important this is? And how that vision was implemented?
CF: The vast industrial-scale coffee farms grown in full sunlight in countries like Brazil have a much greater environmental footprint than small-scale coffee farming practiced in this region of Peru, where coffee is typically grown under the shade of large canopy trees. When I first visited Chilchos, in 2005, a local NGO had been doing great work promoting the increased uptake of coffee farming by residents as an alternative to cattle ranching. The logic of this was that a family could support themselves from a two hectare coffee farm which they could work for 15-20 years under the shade of large canopy trees as an alternative to a 50 hectare cattle ranch which would need to be abandoned in five years and lead to additional forest being cleared.
DH: How did the NGO help the villagers?
CF: They supported the establishment of a cooperative and provided technical assistance and training to many residents. They also negotiated an arrangement with a zoo in Holland who bought all the coffee produced by the village. Inevitably, there were also lots of problems. The process was heavily centralised, so farmers sold their freshly harvested coffee beans to the cooperative which processed it, and while this may have helped quality control it disempowered the farmers who felt they were receiving a poor rate for their unprocessed coffee and were deprived of vital organic material - the coffee pulp - which they could have used to generate their own compost. Most importantly, the price they received wasn’t sufficient to meet their needs or provide a better livelihood than cattle ranching.
DH: I imagine that must have been very disappointing, given all the time and effort put in.
CF: Growing, harvesting and processing coffee is hard work and maintaining even a single hectare farm requires many hands and hours of time. In contrast, rearing cattle is relatively simple - you just clear some forest and allow the cattle to graze, providing them with occasional salt and medicine. Then when you need some cash you just walk the cattle to town and sell it. Somebody always wants meat and while it may take two days to get your product to market, the product even transports itself!
DH: Not so coffee. So what happened with the cooperative?
CF: The farmers began to leave and many even abandoned growing coffee altogether. It was at this point that one of them, Guillermo, approached me and asked for my help.
DH: And what did you do?
CF: I started exploring the possibility of helping them export their coffee directly to a buyer who was prepared to pay more for their coffee than the low prices paid on the commodity markets. I had a friend who ran a roastery, the Missing Bean in Oxford, so I took him to visit Chilchos and he was excited by the idea of supporting such an amazing village. Guillermo’s coffee tasted great but the quality in terms of the uniformity of the size of beans and its humidity levels meant it wouldn’t qualify as speciality coffee. Even so, the Missing Bean was prepared to buy the whole crop and pay significantly above the going rate for his beans as part of a long-term commitment to the village.
DH: That’s great to hear. So how did you, Guillermo and the others feel after you managed to successfully transport your first crop out of the village and over that 4,000 metre-high pass? And how did you bring it over to the UK?
CF: Our first export was just four sacks - or 200kg - of green coffee beans. Getting that over the mountains was child’s play for Guillermo compared to navigating the complex web of paperwork to get it licensed for export and on a boat to Tilbury docks in the UK in a shipping container. Everything is so much harder the first time. We soon discovered it’s far easier to rent an 18 tonne container than it was to find a small corner of space in somebody else’s container for a few sacks!
DH: Final question: where exactly can I now buy your coffee in the UK? Your bike in London, the Missing Bean in Oxford. . . anywhere else?
CF: You can also enjoy drinking it at a couple of brilliant independent local cafés near me in north London who have put supply chains they trust at the heart of their approach. Visit Pulse and Pickle in Walthamstow or Bolland and Crust in Tottenham for fantastic food, events and, of course, a delicious cup of coffee.
DH: Conrad, thank you so much and good luck with everything.