Down on Kahawa Shamba

And I didn't even have to be a biscuit...

Yesterday I went on a day trip to Kahawa Shamba, an eco-tourism project of KNCU to visit a small coffee farm, along with Kara and a delegation from the African Fair Trade Network (AFN). We went to the village of Urumsumi, about 30 minutes outside of Moshi, up in the foothills of Mt. Kilimanjaro where the weather is much nicer. The Kahawa Shamba project benefits three primary societies that are a part of KNCU (which has a total of 67 primary societies). The project is run by local farm families, who serve as tour guides and cooks, and is a bridge between producers and consumers. They get about 1100 tourist visitors in the high season, primarily with groups. Most of these tourists are already the type interested in fair trade, and like to see the impact as well as the origins of their purchases. Unfortunately there is not a way for them to buy coffee after the tour (something the roasting value-addition project should fix), and the farmers don't know much about fair trade. These primary societies certainly benefit more from the tourism project than from the fair trade premiums.

The coffee tour on the farm takes you step by step through the seed-to-cup process. Unfortunately, since the harvest is over, we were not able to pick the ripe red cherries, so the first part of the process had to be explained to us. We tried running some green cherries through the pulper, but they just get crushed, rather than depulped. The crushed green cherries smell like fresh peas. From the parchment (dried, depulped coffee) stage on, we were able to participate. We removed the husks by mashing the beans in a giant mortar and pestle (more about the de-husking process on another day...), then roasted the green beans in a broken piece of clay pot over an open fire, stirring constantly to get as even a roast as possible. After second crack, we removed the beans from the fire and returned them to the mortar, where we ground them. In the meantime we started boiling water over the fire, then added the ground coffee. And then, after boiling the coffee for a while, we drank it! Seed-to-cup!

It was really cool to be on the farm and talking to farmers, hearing their concerns, realities, and aspirations, and especially interesting to be there with the AFN, since they are interested in how to make fair trade better for the farmers. There has been a lot of talk, on the farm and elsewhere, about value-addition, which is what KNCU's roasting project is, and local labelling. These ideas are all still new to me, but I'm gaining many insights.