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Darrin Daniel, Allegro Green Coffee Buyer
Armenia, Colombia October 2nd thru 6th
The 6th Annual Let’s Talk Coffee has just ended in the beautiful southern coffee region of Armenia, Colombia. One of our most unique coffee supply partners, Sustainable Harvest Coffee Importers, organizes this event in different coffee producing countries in Latin America in order to bring together coffee farmers, exporters, importers and roasters from all over the world. The goal is to find a common language to help support the entire specialty coffee supply chain. This year nearly three hundred attended from twenty countries; the theme was “Certified Quality” and people from as far away as Ethiopia, South Africa, Tanzania, Ecuador, Mexico and Brazil represented their coffee producing nations. For Allegro, this represents a golden opportunity to meet one-on-one with our supply partners, hear their concerns, share our accomplishments and further understand what the relationship between farmer and roaster means. Each year the event has grown and thanks to the hard work of Sustainable Harvests staff, this year was extraordinarily successful.
I am travelling through the northern Peruvian provinces of San Martin, Amazonas, and Caja Marca with our other Allegro buyer Darrin and Claudia and Angel from Sustainable Harvest Importers. Sustainable is helping build labs and train cuppers at the four cooperatives from whom we source coffee beans in this vast agricultural region situated between the Amazon and the Pacific. In the last few years we have moved our sourcing from the southern Cuzco province, which perhaps is more romantic given that it is the home of stunning Machu Picchu, to this northern coffee belt where we aim to build more direct links with growers and find more consistent quality. From Lima, we caught a flight to the bustling town of Tarapoto in San Martin, which at one time was the epicenter of the coca trade in Peru controlled by the FARC-like, MRTA (Revolutionary Movement of Tupac Amaru*). The MRTA brought a temporary prosperity to San Martin, where according to the locals, everyone benefited in some way from the coca trade and walked with their pockets stuffed with silver. It was also a time when there was very little worry about crime with the paramilitaries acting as the local law enforcement. Fear of a knock on the door by men in camouflage discouraged most lawbreakers. Supposedly the MRTA so controlled the area they used the local roads as landing strips for their airplanes that would literally land, dump bags of money out one door as people on the ground would load up bundles of coca in the other in less than a minute without stopping the plane. Those days are over now, as coca has been completely wiped out in this region by the US round-up eradication campaign that so destroyed the land which was sprayed that nothing has been able to grow there for the last 15 years. Farmers moved into new areas to plant coffee in the highlands and cacao, rice and palm in the valleys. The pockets of the locals may no longer be overflowing with silver, but Tarapoto is once again bustling as the center for legit agricultural products and noisy with the sound of the local motor taxis or tuk-tuks imported from Korea it seems.
