Before the specialty coffee associations of the United States and Europe merged to form SCA, I spent a few years as a volunteer on the SCAA Sustainability Council. I was working at the time for Catholic Relief Services, leading coffee projects in Central and South America. Most of the other members were from the coffee industry, working at traders or roasters. During my first meeting, one of the items on the agenda was a review of submissions for the annual SCAA Sustainability Award. All the finalists were donor-funded projects. I thought that was crazy, and I said so.
As someone who led donor-funded projects for a living, I told my colleagues that I couldn't think of anything less sustainable. I suggested that the implementers of donor-funded projects spend other people's money until it's gone, usually over a period three to five years, then move on, finding more money to spend someplace else. Nothing especially sustainable about that. I told them that when my colleagues and I talked about sustainability, we didn't talk about projects, we talked about business models. We envied them their ability to finance engagement with coffee communities through their own business revenue, their opportunity to build trading relationships that could last much longer than our projects, and their ability to deliver the cash farming communities needed most, rather than the goods and services that are the stock-and-trade of development projects.
Later, when I finally decided to leave CRS for a chance to try my hand as a coffee buyer at Intelligentsia, this was a big reason why: I wanted to stop delivering short-term in-kind support to growers and start paying them cash for coffee in ways that built for the long term. At the time I considered it to be the source of greater value.
I now understand that I only had it half-right. I was right to focus on the importance of trade to outcomes in coffee-producing communities, but wrong to see trade as separate from or even superior to aid.
Trade does have the potential to deliver much more financial value over a much longer timeframe than aid. But often the benefits delivered by trade represent returns on earlier investments made by the aid sector. In many cases, trade is only able to deliver financial assets to coffee communities because aid first invested in helping them build natural, human, and social assets, including many investments that the trade would not have made because the risks were perceived as too high, the benefits were seen as too low, or both.
I should have seen that more clearly all along. After all, I had spent years in Latin America working with colleagues to deliver a broad array of services and subsidies to growers -- agronomic assistance, seed, financial management training, credit, Q Grader courses, market intelligence, trade pilots, certifications, climate change models, support for adaptation strategies, and more -- all with the explicit objective of helping them access and succeed in higher-value segments of the coffee market. In a few cases, we succeeded, and any true accounting of those successes must include a consideration of both aid and trade.
In a handful of communities in southern Colombia, for example, the CRS Borderlands project invested millions of dollars to help producers increase production, improve quality, and expand access to higher-value segments of the coffee market -- producers who had never met a roaster or made a direct sale at the time the project started. More than a decade after we connected those producers with roasters, Counter Culture and Stumptown are still sourcing coffee from project participants. Together they have sourced millions of pounds of coffee from project participants so far, with no end in sight. The financial value of their purchases is a multiple of the value of our investments in training and capacity building, but would not likely have happened without our work: no trade without aid.
In the ongoing conversation in Washington and in the coffee industry about the future of U.S. overseas development assistance, let's reject the false dichotomy of aid or trade. We should celebrate the potential impact of trade on coffee-producing communities, and honor the catalytic role of aid.
-- Michael Sheridan
