Interested in learning more about the producers who grow your coffee, the co-operative businesses they have created to successfully compete in the global marketplace, and the impact this work has had on their communities?
Don’t take our word!
You can visit some of these co-ops yourselves. Stay in the homes of the farmers. Meet their families. Learn to make tamales and tortillas. Pick coffee. Try your hand at depulping the freshly picked beans. Visit the dry mills where the coffee is processed. Hike in the forested mountains where monkeys and opossums still hang out in the trees. Visit the schools, health clinics and other community projects that Fair Trade premiums have helped support.
A number of our co-operative partners have developed eco-tourism projects so that students, Fair Trade Advocates, coffee zealots, and the cross-culturally minded can visit, stay in farming communities, and learn for themselves what the buzz is all about. As someone who brings many groups to visit the producer co-ops and meet the farmers, I can tell you there’s nothing more interesting, more fun… and more life changing than the relationships that get formed when consumers take the time to meet those who produce their food – be it coffee, tea, chocolate or domestic products. You can read about Fair Trade, sustainable agriculture, and rural development all you want –but nothing takes the place of real human interactions. These eco-tourism projects offer a unique (and unfortunately, rare) opportunity to connect deeper to those whose hard work impacts our own lives so fully.
Equal Exchange has been bringing visitors to one of these highly organized farmer co-ops, CECOCAFEN in Nicaragua, for over ten years. These annual delegation visits, together with our strong relationships with both CECOCAFEN and with our Interfaith partner, Lutheran World Relief, provided some of the early thinking and financial support that eventually led the co-op to develop an integrated eco-tourism project. An exciting aspect of this program is that it developed with full participation of the community: the men, women and youth were involved in its design and implementation.
For more information about this exciting project, as well as information about how to visit, you can go directly to their web-site:
Because, as they say on their website, “Fair Trade is more than just a higher price.”
Thanks for highlighting this Phyllis! I have been fortunate enough to visit La Reyna twice through the eco-tourism project on a Lutheran World Relief study tour and each time has been an amazing experience. We talked with community leaders, feasted on home cooked meals, hiked up to a lush, scenic overlook and connected with our host families. I highly recommend a visit!
Thank you Phyllis for your wonderful article highlighting community-based ecotourism. As the Program Associate for Latin America at Lutheran World Relief (LWR), I can attest that there is a great amount of interest in ecotourism projects, and they are a powerful way for people to witness firsthand the benefits of Fair Trade. LWR’s current ecotourism project in Nicaragua is managed by a cooperative member of CECOCAFEN, the local agricultural association UCA San Ramón. It is hoped that coordination of the project on a more local level will yield positive results.
The goal of this project is to make the community of La Reyna the principal destination within Matagalpa for ecotourists by improving the quality of their services and promoting effective marketing techniques both nationally and internationally. As of the June, 2009, successful results of this project include the completion of a strategic plan and the construction of key community buildings including the visitor control booth, visitor reception and meeting pavilion, and visitor bathrooms. Repairs to the bridge that provides access to La Reyna are also underway. In addition, the host families are providing feedback surveys, and record keeping regarding the number of visitors and their contact information has improved. A recent 7-month period reports that 425 tourists were hosted. In addition, marketing information is under development, as well as improved media contacts as evidenced by recent filming in La Reyna by The Travel Channel and National Geographic.
Thanks again for your article. We hope that through partnerships with organizations like Equal Exchange and LWR, community-based ecotourism will continue to highlight the benefits of Fair Trade for visitors while at the same time providing a viable means for rural families to increase their incomes and improve their livelihoods.
Great article!! We also wrote about fair trade month: http://fashionableearth.org/blog/2009/10/28/fair-trade-month/