Development Skeptic Praises ACDI/VOCA
When business looks favorably on our work, it speaks volumes about sustainability and impact. Especially when that person is a development skeptic.
Recently, the influential Geoff Watts, vice president of coffee and green coffee buyer for Chicago-based Intelligentsia Coffee, commented on an ACDI/VOCA specialty coffee community development project in Colombia. He had gone there to judge an ACDI/VOCA-organized competition among producers in the departments of Huila, Tolima, Cauca, Narino and Cundinamarca. From an initial group of 150 coffees, he and his fellow judges moved 56 on to the semifinals. The final round took place in Ibague during the ExpoCafe specialty coffee event.
As he put it, “Everyone involved hoped that showcasing some of these lovely coffees would generate interest among the judges and other conference attendees. They hoped right.”
Discerning Palette
Sourcing high-quality coffee is crucial to Intelligentsia, and that is reflected in the stories behind the coffee that are told on its website. There, Watts writes:
"I can get a little skeptical when I run into development agencies operating projects in coffee-producing countries that purport to help farmers achieve better livelihoods. There has been a long history of failure in that regard….
“Some of the best projects I've seen in coffee have been the ones that recognized up front that to really accomplish anything lasting they would need to plan for continuity and be willing to keep operating the project until it either began to be self-sustaining and self-regenerating or until it was deemed a failure.
“For this reason I like what ACDI/VOCA has done in Colombia in recent years. They've been operating a Specialty Coffee project in Colombia since 2002, and it is one of the more thoughtful, well executed and well planned I've run into.”
It helps to know that Intelligentsia represents a high order of coffee connoisseurship. As MSN’s Bret Stetka put it last month in a story highlighting America’s best coffees, Intelligentsia has “national presence and near-universal respect among coffee enthusiasts.” Also last month, Nick Cho of Portafilter.net listed Intelligentsia, Stumptown and Counter Culture as the three most influential companies of the decade. Indeed, the last two U.S. barista champions have been from Intelligentsia.
Quality First
Coffee has over 800 flavor components. Coffee lovers know it cannot be treated as a commodity. This helps explain why the ACDI/VOCA project is different.
Watts gives his opinion on why many development projects get it wrong: “…One of the mistakes that gets repeated over and over is that idea of coffee quality—the real, intrinsic quality of the coffees being produced—is either poorly understood or not recognized as important.
“Sometimes this is because there is a feeling that coffee is still a commodity and that this whole ‘specialty’ thing is just a niche that isn't so consequential in the macroeconomic picture. Or it is because quality in the cup is regarded as too elusive to pin down and quantify, so it just gets paid lip service and is not treated as a central objective. That's problematic because by the time the curtain falls producers will need something they can hold on to, and the ability to produce legitimately and consistently great, high-quality coffees is something of tremendous value that farmers should take with them and use to their benefit long after the development organization has pulled up stakes and moved along.”
Coffee quality has always been an ACDI/VOCA emphasis in Colombia. To refine growing techniques and produce the best coffee possible, ACDI/VOCA trained local farmers in quality assessment. Over 100 Colombians were sent to the headquarters of the Specialty Coffee Association of America and the Coffee Quality Institute in Long Beach, Calif., for advanced training in cupping, a rigorous, systematic process of brewing and tasting high-end coffee to grade quality. The participants, preselected for their sensitive palates, moved into a high echelon of coffee tasters. Besides becoming more discerning, they gained an understanding of how global experts like Watts evaluate specialty coffee. When they returned home, they shared their new cupping skills with farmers to pass on their appreciation of coffee quality, and they helped incentivize the capacity for growing better coffee.
Growing better coffee is key in our community development approach for shifting growers from coca to coffee because better coffee means increased incomes. The growing preoccupation with coffee quality has made it a more acceptable—and definitely safer—livelihood choice than growing coca. To date, over 6,400 families have benefited from the specialty coffee program and more than 17,500 hectares (43,243 acres) of illicit crops have been manually eradicated. The market connections ACDI/VOCA facilitates strengthen the sustainability of this alternative livelihood.
Farmer Gabriel Gils says, "Being able to speak with an exporter is something never seen before. ...It would never have occurred to me that I would have such an important contact."
“Coffees worth getting excited about”
“I can tell you from firsthand experience that traveling halfway around the world to work as an unpaid judge and taste and score nothing but mediocre or even poor coffees is a special kind of bummer,” Watts says. “It is a week of your life you'll never get back. Fortunately this time there were indeed some coffees worth getting excited about, and the organizers took the time to make sure the farmers were able to interact with and get some good feedback from the international judges who had scored the coffees. Out of 10 finalists there were four coffee lots that I really liked. Two of them made the trip back to Chicago with me.”
The two coffees, El Nogal (“effulgent, clean, Meyer lemon”) and Las Mesas (“balanced, round, spice”) are featured on the Intelligentsia website as seasonal offerings at $22 per pound. Drink them and become a believer in development yourself.
Read Watts’s entire commentary at www.intelligentsiacoffee.com/store/product/id/7291.
Learn more
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