About This Coffee
CECAFE (Cooperativa Agraria Ecológica de Lonya Grande) was founded in 2006 by 80 producers in Lonya Grande in the Amazonas region of Peru. From the beginning CECAFE, led by Gilmer Sánchez, focused on living their values of collaborative social improvement and entrepreneurship.
Today, CECAFE has over 800 members whose coffee is sold through several product lines, including a women’s program for their roughly 165+ female members and an exclusive microlot line. CECAFE joins these individual producers into a cooperative that’s stronger than the sum of its parts. Together, CECAFE members increase their market competitiveness, provide & receive technical and financial support and run social and environmental programs in their communities.
CECAFE focuses on using fair business practices to continue to benefit their members. In addition to the usual quality control practices, CECAFE keeps careful, up-to-date records of all coffee deliveries, sorted by farmer, in an online file system. Clients are able to access this system and trace their coffee.
Cultivation
In order to help them compete in the global marketplace, CECAFE provides technical and agronomical support to help farmers produce high quality coffees in environmentally sustainable ways.
CECAFE promotes agricultural diversification as a way for producing families to increase their economic stability & food security. The cooperative also provides training on farm management, including: shade management, soil conservation, using drip irrigation and methods for organic weed and pest control.
Harvest & Post-Harvest
Farmers selectively handpick ripe cherry. Cherry is floated and washed in clean water before being placed in solar dryers. Cherry is carefully labeled and kept in distinct lots based on the variety and day of harvest. Cherry is turned frequently to ensure even drying.
Coffee in Peru
Peru holds exceptional promise as a producer of high-quality coffees. The country is the largest exporter of organic Arabica coffee globally. With extremely high altitudes and fertile soils, the country’s smallholder farmers also produce some stunning specialty coffees.
Though coffee arrived in Peru in the 1700s, very little coffee was exported until the late 1800s. Until that point, most coffee produced in Peru was consumed locally. When coffee leaf rust hit Indonesia in the late 1800s, a country central to European coffee imports at the time, Europeans began searching elsewhere for their fix. Peru was a perfect option.
Between the late 1800s and the first World War, European interests invested significant resources into coffee production in Peru. However, with the advent of the two World Wars, England and other European powers became weakened and took a less colonialist perspective. When the British and other European land owners left, their land was purchased by the government and redistributed to locals. The Peruvian government repurchased the 2 million hectares previously granted to England and distributed the lands to thousands of local farmers. Many of these farmers later grew coffee on the lands they received.
Today, Peruvian coffee growers are overwhelmingly small scale. Farmers in Peru usually process their coffee on their own farms. Most coffee is Fully washed. Cherry is usually pulped, fermented and dried in the sun on raised beds or drying sheds. Drying greenhouses and parabolic beds are becoming more common as farmers pivot towards specialty markets.
After drying, coffee will then be sold in parchment to the cooperative. Producers who are not members of a cooperative will usually sell to a middleman.
The remoteness of farms combined with their small size means that producers need either middlemen or cooperatives to help get their coffee to market. Cooperative membership protects farmers greatly from exploitation and can make a huge difference to income from coffee. Nonetheless, currently only around 15-25% of smallholder farmers have joined a coop group.