COFFEE BREAK CONVERSATIONS WITH MS. VIE REYES
This past weekend, I went on a coffee eco-tour in the
Sagada, Mt. Province with my fellow Kaya Collaborative colleagues. Part of the
tour was a coffee tasting session in a restaurant called Bana’s Café. My
friends and I trekked to the area where the coffee fruits grew and checked out
the coffee-making & roasting process that the community implemented under
the business model set by Bote Central, a social enterprise that hopes to
revolutionize the Philippine coffee landscape. And, of course, we were offered
the product of their hard work: Civet coffee. The civet cat eats the coffee
fruit, which allows the coffee seedlings to be transformed by the cat’s
digestive enzymes. When the seeds are extracted from their feces and cleaned,
it is ready to roast and be turned into high-class coffee.
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| A cup of delicious civet coffee |
Little did I know, three days later, Gifts & Graces was
going to present me with the opportunity to learn about the workings of Bote
Central through their founder, Mrs. Vie Reyes. Through our first “Coffee Break
Conversations,” Ms. Reyes discussed the brief history of the discovery of
coffee, the business model that Bote Central implemented, and the fair trade
practices that their organization applies to directly benefit the coffee
farming communities in the provinces.
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| Ms. Vie Reyes talking about coffee, fair trade and her social enterprise, Bote Central |
Coffee was discovered when monks and missionaries observed
that goats were extremely hyperactive, even at night, upon eating coffee
berries from a tree. The monks decided to try out the berries themselves. They
were delighted to find that coffee kept them wide awake even during the long
hours of evening prayer. And the rest, as they say, is history.
Coffee was discovered through the observation of goats, who
were extremely hyperactive, even at night, upon eating berries from a tree.
Monks and missionaries decided to try this diet out. They discovered that it
kept them wide awake even during the long hours of evening prayer. Coffee’s
reputation then spread all across the globe. If coffee started out with goats,
fair trade started out with the coffee industry. When it was observed that
coffee farmers didn’t get their fair cost, fair trade industries started to
kick in.
Reyes explained that, currently, the value chain for coffee
starts out with the smallholders of the beans, then to the agents, to the consolidators,
and finally, to the coffee buying stations such as Nescafe. However, this
process did not leave a big enough impact to the livelihood of the
smallholders.
Instead, they proposed a smaller scale value chain to be
implemented in coffee communities: from the smallholders to community-based
COOPs/POs/COs to community-based or local markets and eventually to export
markets or markets outside of the community. As a fair trade enterprise, they
offer goods and services to the communities to aid them in their coffee-making
processes (ex. roasters) and also teach them how to reach their broader market.
This model implemented a value-adding strategy. Usually,
farmers gain revenue by selling the raw green coffee beans that they collect
from their land, without actually understanding their potential values. Green
coffee beans are served 1.2x the value per kilo, roasted coffee beans are sold
twice as much, while one cup of coffee is sold for 12x as much.
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| Gifts & Graces staff members sipping coffee while listening in on the conversation |
Bote Central, the Philippine Coffee Alliance and many other
coffee revolutionaries focus on the farmers, the sector that needs the biggest
help. They tell organized farmer clusters to get seedlings from communities,
not from corporate sources, they aid them in their sourcing of quality green
beans, and lastly, they make innovations to help communities prepare coffee at
no extra cost.
Bote Central now has 43 community-based coffee enterprises
all over the Philippines implementing the same business model as what I had
experienced in Sagada. In these areas, Bote Central was able to help the
community members start to own the coffee that they were producing. They
instilled in the worker’s minds that it was their craft and so helped them take
charge of their businesses. These community-based coffee enterprises are
developing and Vie Reyes plans to expand to many more areas.
Hopefully, in the future, more collaborations
and conversations between Bote Central and Gifts & Graces will arise as a
result of the emerging industry of fair trade. Thank you once again to Ms. Vie
Reyes for an insightful conversation!
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Mikaela Reyes, an incoming sophomore from Wesleyan University in Connecticut, is the Kaya Collaborative intern for Gifts & Graces this summer.
