Our Products and Exports of Specialty Coffee and other Agriculture Products

In February 2001, Aldea Global’s marketing department conducted an in-depth market study led by a Jinotegan agronomist with an MBA, Ing. Miguel Arroliga Rizo, along with two staff agronomists (a horticulturist and a long time Aldea Global extensionist). They visited farmer markets, wholesale markets, retailers, exporters, government and non-government organizations involved in national and international markets, as well as micro-enterprises transforming agricultural products for export.

For three months, this team analyzed market opportunities that would benefit farmers as well as this Association. They tracked 24 vegetables over an eighteen month period, determining exactly what price wholesalers paid farmers as well as price fluctuations on a daily basis. This study exposed the volatility in the vegetable market due to seasonal plantings and North American/Central American free-trade treaties allowing imports to flood and depress market prices, ex. potatoes from Canada. Extreme price fluctuations place vegetable farmers into a high credit risk category. Aldea Global, working as an intermediary selling its members produce, would also suffer from these erratic market movements.

To avoid these erratic market movements, Aldea Global searched for profitable alternative crops with guaranteed future prices for the quantities contracted. Under these criteria, this study identified two viable opportunities for Aldea Global as well as farmers: gourmet coffee, red dasheen and black beans for export. Currently Aldea Global’s marketing department has established two export programs: gourmet coffee with Esperanza Coffee Group S.A. and black beans with AGRONEGSA to Costa Rica.

ALDEA GLOBAL'S COFFEE

In Jinotega, coffee is harvested from December to March.To produce the best quality coffee, only ripe red cherries must be harvested. A single green cherry will ruin the flavor of thousands of red cherries. Small and medium farmers harvest their own coffee and process small quantities of coffee every day. This has certain advantages: ripe, red coffee cherries are more carefully harvested, and the time interval from harvest to milling is short, preventing fermentation damage.

Milling and Fermentation are also Critical... After milling, the coffee bean is sweet and covered with honey. Its fermentation gives each coffee its unique taste and flavor.

Coffee must be dried and selected… After fermentation, the coffee bean must dry in the sun. Damaged and inferior beans are carefully selected out by the farmer’s family. This is the work of a craftsman—producing small quantities of excellent quality coffee.

All the hard work and loving care taken during production, harvest and wet milling is lost if the dry milling is not processed to perfection. Our dry mill, Esperanza Coffee Group, works in close partnership with our coffee farmers during harvest—cupping each day’s harvest to ensure quality.

Aldea Global provides impeccable processing - Strictly Hard Bean coffees with European Preparation - to provide great tasting coffee.

ALDEA GLOBAL'S COFFEE VISION AND MISSION

Our Coffee Vision

Jinotega’s small coffee farmers producing great tasting coffee for the gourmet consumer.

Jinotega is Nicaragua’s coffee capital with a 150-year coffee history and culture. Inside Jinotega’s cloud forest Datanlí - El Diablo, its mountains produce emerald trees yielding the finest red coffee cherries to brew the most aromatic cup of coffee in the world. Small farmers, whom previously never received recognition for their quality coffees, through Aldea Global can now compete to produce the greatest tasting coffee - guaranteeing them profitable returns in the gourmet market.

Our Coffee Mission

To improve the small farmer’s ability to continually raise his/her coffee quality to the highest gourmet standards through coffee production and processing systems that preserve the environment. Aldea Global will provide impeccable processing - Strictly Hard Bean coffees with a European Preparation - to our customers for great tasting coffee.

Our Coffee Objectives

Sell our quality coffee directly to roasters to establish a personal relationship between our farmers and their customers.

Sell our freshly roasted, great tasting, coffee directly to church groups wanting to make an immediate impact in the quality of life for fellow believers in Nicaragua.

COFFEE CRISIS

Since Jinotega is Nicaragua’s coffee capital, all anyone talks about in Jinotega is “La Crisis”. In 2000 coffee traded at US$1.20 a pound, a year later it was US$0.45 cents a pound. Imagine the human impact of receiving only 38 percent of what you earned a year ago. Everyone says it will worsen and last at least another two years. Economics dictates many coffee farmers will go bankrupt, loose their farms, or plow under their coffee searching for other alternatives. This problem extends beyond coffee farmers and their families to include related businesses as well as farm workers and their families. Before “La Crisis”, Jinotega had the nation’s highest diarrhea and mortality rates for children under five years of age, so children’s health indicators will obviously not improve over the next few years.

Data shows this “Hurricane de Café” parallels Hurricane Mitch’s devastation. Overnight, the profitability of 143,000 manzanas (250,250 acres) of coffee fell to zero. In 1999/2000, Nicaragua produced 200 million pounds of coffee. In 2000/2001, production levels dropped to 160 million pounds. For this 2001/2002 harvest, they estimate production levels to fall an additional 40 percent. Coffee, once Nicaragua’s number one export, is now third after cattle and fish. Jinotega has already lost over 50,000 permanent jobs related to the coffee industry. This crisis will affect over 180,000 seasonal coffee pickers with a significantly reduced harvest. Over 2,500 Jinotega coffee farmers have problems with different financial institutions. Sixteen of eighteen coffee exporters are behind in their payments to Jinotega’s municipal government. Over the last year, four Nicaraguan private banks crashed (BAMER, INTERBANK, BANCO DEL CAFÉ, BANIC). No matter which way you look, there is NO sign of that proverbial light at the end of the tunnel.

In September 2001, Aldea Global held two sessions with coffee farmers, whose families are suffering through this “Crisis.” Here are some of their commentaries: “Cheese? It’s been more than a year since we’ve seen it.” “Hospitals only give prescriptions, but those papers don’t cure anyone.” “If someone gets real sick they die, because we don’t have money to transport them to the hospital nor buy medicines.” “When my children complain of pain or fever, I can only tell them to hold on and place a wet cloth on their foreheads.” “I can’t even repair my plastic sheet cover for my roof, so my family gets wet when it rains.” “Coffee (the business) employs from the shoe shine boy to the exporter, but now I can’t even buy sandals for my wife.” “I couldn’t buy any new (used) clothes this year for my family.” “We can’t even feed our chickens and pigs, nor afford the transportation cost to bring them to market.” “The children can’t learn, because they haven’t eaten.” “My kids no longer attend elementary school, because I can’t afford to send them.” One thing is to be poor, another is to live without possible attend to your basic human needs. This circle of poverty is vicious.

Aldea Global represents one of the few, long-term solutions for poor rural farmers from “La Crisis”. Our goal is to continue implementing food security programs, target the fair trade and organic market, develop five niche markets for non-traditional export crops, as well as managing a credit line of US$1,000,000 within five years. We are looking for small commitments, that in the long run will increase our Association’s ability to resolve the “Crisis” facing these small coffee farmers and their families with long-term solutions.

September 2001 quotes from Aldea Global’s members during a local town hall meeting:

The coffee crisis has increased poverty, hunger, malnutrition and death in Jinotega’s rural families.

“Even if a coffee farmer works non-stop, his life is still the worst”. “Even if the government says there is no hunger, because it rained or because grain prices have not risen, it is not true. All we eat are plantains, but that is not nutrition.” “We do not have anything to eat. The corn is not ready, and the plantains and cassava are scarce.” “Even the fish in the lake are now scarce. We have to eat”. “Cheese? It has been more than year since we last ate it.” “We spend our time at home because there is no work”. “Large coffee farmers cannot give work to everybody, so the food for the person that does work—one person’s ration—must be enough to take home for the whole family—seven persons.”

Children are malnourished and families sick.

“My 18 year old son died for lack of money to buy medicines. The hospitals wrote out prescriptions for him, but nobody gets cured with paper.” “When my children complain of pain or fever, all I can tell them is to hold on and put cold compresses on their foreheads.” “We only use medicinal plants to take care of ourselves when we are sick.” “I can’t change my plastic roof. We all get wet, we get sick, and my children cough all the time.” “If somebody gets really sick, he dies. We cannot even pay to take him to the hospital, much less pay for medicines.”

Producers cannot produce and commercialize alternative crops for lack of credit and market.

“Now we can only plant to eat. We have the seed, but we do not have the agricultural inputs. When insects attack our corn, or bean plants suffer from fungi, there is nothing we can do because we lack the agricultural inputs to save our plants”. “We leave our fertile lands barren for lack of credit and inputs to farm the land.” “When coffee prices were high, we planted coffee. Now we cannot plant beans or corn in that land unless we cut down our coffee trees. Monoculture is a problem.” “Now coffee is not enough to live on. Because there is no credit we cannot plant anything else. We can’t even plant our corn.”

The coffee crisis has paralyzed all sectors of the economy.

“Farmers move the local economy with their production, but they do not even have enough money to buy.” “Coffee farmers production benefits everyone from the shoe shine boy to the store salesclerk.” “Market stalls have closed for lack of sales”. “Lack of circulating currency has forced rural families to resort to barter. For example, 100 lbs of coffee got traded for100 lbs of corn to eat.” “I am late because the bus turned back. There were only two passengers.” “The bus from my community did not even bother to make its daily run.” “The buses are empty. The one I came in had only three passengers.”

Coffee farm workers have also been affected.

The coffee farms are working with 30-40% of the normal number of employees due to this crisis. Some farms have closed, abandoning their coffee plantations. Most only provide food and owe months of back salary to their workers. These large farms have reduced personnel and only kept some of the men, but thousands of women farm workers found themselves jobless. Only the person that works receives a food ration, leaving the rest of his family without food. Even offering to work just for food, they still cannot find work.

Rural crime rise due to poverty and hunger caused by this coffee crisis.

“The prisons are filling up, because people are stealing hens to feed their families.” “They steal our grains, because they cannot produce them.” “They stole from me 845 córdobas (US$60), four hens, and kitchen pots. I called the police, and they caught them. It seems they also stole and killed a cow, and they left a heifer dead in San Carlos.” “Beans, pots,… they steal anything to help their families survive.”

It’s hard to be poor, but it is worst to be left without access to basic needs and services resulting from this coffee crisis.

“Before this coffee crisis, I was poor but I could send my kids to school. Now, I can’t even send them.” “It has been more than a year since we bought any (used) clothes.” “Before, we could buy soap. Now, we ask for soap leftovers from our neighbors.”

This Crisis is affecting women, children and family unity.

“Women suffer most. Now they must withstand their pain, because we do not have medicines to cure them.” “I can’t even buy shoes for my wife.” “Children cannot learn, because they have not even eaten.” “Young women migrate to Managua and leave their kids behind with their grandmother or a neighbor. They send them something if they can.” “My son left for Costa Rica to look for work."

COFFEE PARTNERSHIPS

In association with Esperanza Coffee Group (www.esperanza.com.ni), Aldea Global searches for coffee roasters offering a just price for shade grown, environmentally friendly, gourmet coffee produced in Jinotega’s cloud forest by small coffee farmers. Aldea Global sells coffee to Holland Coffee Group and individual roasters. Aldea Global is a Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA, www.scaa.com) as well as a Specialty Coffee Association of Nicaragua (ACEN) member (www.cafesdenicaragua.com) . Aldea Global's Fair Trade certification is in process.

CUP OF EXCELLENCE

On May 24th 2002, Aldea Global was awarded FIRST PLACE in Nicaragua's "Cup of Excellence" competition.

An international juror of 25 coffee tasting experts identified the best cup of coffee in the country. Aldea Global competed against 285 others Nicaraguan coffee producers. The winning coffee we submitted was a coffee blend from two small farmers who could not meet the minimum volume requirement to enter this competition individually. We provided them with loans to pick their harvest and technical assistance in their wet milling process, as well as processed their coffee in Nicaragua's premier dry mill - Esperanza Coffee Group (www.esperanza.com.ni).

This was our first year in the coffee business, but from the start it focused on quality. It aims to assist small farmers produce the best coffee while receiving a just price.

Our coffee will be auctioned over the Specialty Coffee Association of America's (www.scaa.org) website on July 1st. We only have 15 sacks (150 lbs each) for this auction, because that's all we could afford to invest or retain from this year's harvest. With prices dropping all the time, we couldn't afford to risk selling quality coffee at even lower prices.

We hope our demonstrated quality potential will encourage roasters to buy our coffee at or near fair trade prices, allowing us to invest in improving quality through technical assistance for small farms as well as their individual wet mills. We must earn enough to cover higher dry mill costs, because each day a farmer brings his coffee to us, whether it be one sack or twenty, they all must be cupped to guarantee quality. A good price will guarantee great quality.

In an interview in the national newspaper La Prensa on May 21st 2002, two of the international judges in the "Cup of Excellence" competition in Nicaragua said that the coffees tested in Nicaragua are very good, “this (Nicaragua) is the third country in the area where we held this competition, and this has been the best tasting for a first time participant, comparing it to other countries”.

FAIR TRADE CERTIFIED

Why Fair Trade?

In Northern Nicaragua, Jinotega offers one of the best environments in the world to grow great tasting coffee. For over 150 years, generations of Jinotega’s small farmers have produced shade grown coffee in harmony with their environment. However, in real terms, current international coffee prices are the lowest in history - threatening an entire way of life. These extremely low prices - as low as US$ 0.42 per pound - fail to cover production costs causing poverty, malnutrition and death. There is no clearer way to state how the current coffee market’s crash has impacted Jinotega than the words of local Dr. Douglas Carvayo, Ministry of Health, “Infant mortality from severe respiratory infection has doubled due to increased malnutrition since last year.”

Jinotega’s small farmers should receive a just price for their high quality gourmet coffee. These just prices must cover the cost of production as well as provide a fair income allowing farmers to provide a dignified life for their families.

Aldea Global mailed its Fair Trade Application in April 2002. We expect our 2002/2003 harvest to be Fair Trade Certified, setting a base price of $ 1.26 per pound. To learn more about Fair Trade Certified write to the Fair Trade Labelling Organization (FLO) International (r.hoppen@fairtrade.net).

Little Malanga Scientific Name: Xantosoma spp.
Presentation: Available: Quantity: Frequency:	Fresh produce in 30, 40 & 50 lb boxes  November - June  A container(1,150 boxes)  Every two weeks
Nicaragua is the United States' third largest provider of Lille Malanga. We offer you Cassava of the Valencia variety. We provide this product with paraffin to improve its presentation and shelf life

Our Diversification Program
Our clients in Canada and the United States have asked us to diversify our production to meet their needs. Starting November 2005, we can offer you ginger (Zingiber officinale), white malanga (Xanthosoma spp.), yampeen (Doscorea trifida), yam (Doscorea spp.) and eddoes (Colocasia spp.).

The Logistics
Ten small farmers must coordinate their production to fill a single container. They must meet our high quality standards when they bring their production to our collection center.

The Packing Plant is the Farmer's Partner
All the hard work and loving care taken during production is lost if the roots and tubers are not cleaned and processed to perfection. Our packing plant record shows that we can meet the highest international standards. Our product is packaged and shipped to the United States, Puerto Rico and Europe in refrigerated containers.

Quality Starts on the Farm
Aldea Global groups farmers throughout Nicaragua to provide you a high quality product. Our roots and tubers are grown in Jinotega and Waslala to the North East, as well as in Nueva Guinea and Río San Juan to the South East. Our technical asssistance and post-harvest services guarantee our products' high quality and inocuity.

Ginger	Eddoe	White Malanga	Yampeen	Yam

Cassava Scientific Name: Manihot esculenta
Presentation: Available: Quantity: Frequency:	Fresh produce in 30, 40 & 50 lb boxes  November - June  A container(1,150 boxes)  Monthly