David is owner of Sustainable Harvest, the importer we are working with on the Gombe Coffee Project. If you haven’t tried this coffee, with the remarkable story, now is a great time. I will be visit David in Tanzania later this month. I hope you enjoy his update from the Gombe National Park.
Jeff
Report by David Griswold / Sustainable Harvest
6:05 am
Gombe Ranger Station/Overnight Guest House
Gombe Reserve National Park
Tanzania
It is still pitch black outside, the generators have been off since midnight to conserve fuel. So there are no lights to turn on as I push back the mosiquito net that has been covering me while I sleep. Fritz Kramer, a Swiss development expert that has come down to look at our model and see how we can find partners for our work, is in the other bed across the room. His cell phone alarm has gone off, and he can’t find it. I feel slightly geeky about it, but he needs to turn off the incessant alarm sound, so I pull my iPhone from my bag beneath the bed and it lights up the room so he can find the cell and stop the noise. I can hear the sound of the waves of Lake Tanganika, just 30 feet from my front door, as they lap up on shore. Further down the hill is Jane’s (Goodall’s) House, which is housing the Roots and Shoots volunteers who have come out to work on chimpanzee projects in this remote area. Jane, we are told, is coming out in a month, but her son, Grub, is here, and walked by us at sunset last night carrying two large fish that he had caught out of the lake. <br>
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I decide to come upstairs, to the dining area, and set up my laptop to write this journal email. It is a little spooky to be in complete darkness, sitting at a table listening to the cicadas and sometimes, off in the far distance, sounds that I assume are chimps or baboons. We’ve seen a lot of baboons and other monkeys on our tour of the park the day before. But now, being the only one up, I am a little spooked when I hear rustling of leaves and unsual sounds. I usually flip down the lid of my laptop, as I have done several times while writing this email, and sit in total blackness, waiting for something to appear. And then I start writing again.
The trip to Gombe began with a boat ride from Kigoma about noon yesterday, and took two hours. We hugged the coast of Western side of Tanzania, passing denuded landscapes where all the trees have been cut for firewood and long poles to hang fishing nets between small boats to scoop up the available Tanganika fish. There are small fishing villages, and young African kids, completely naked, run into the waves several hundred feet from us, yelling to us in Swahili. On the boat is Fritz, Phil Beattie, a roaster customer from Seattle, and our staff members Sara Morrocchi and Genevieve Edens. Sara and Gena are two are exceptional people, as I have been able to observe firsthand by coming to visit our office in Kigoma, which we opened a year and a half ago. They not only speak the language fluently,and understand the culture, but they are so intelligent and capable. They have done amazing things to build out an entire coffee quality improvement project that is impacting 9 villages and 6,000 farmers. As we ride along in the boat, they tell me story after story of how it is to get things done in Africa. I am amazed by their patience and perserverence, as most people couldn’t last a month out here. In fact, this area is one of the least supported by international development projects. With the exception of the Jane Goodall Institute and small groups like Action Aid, there are few examples of projects like the one Sustainable Harvest at Origin/Africa has been able to successfully construct.
Our concept that the Lemelson Foundation funded was that by bringing outside technology (new, low use coffee processing machines from Latin America) we could create a successful specialty coffee program here for the Kigoma region that would encourage better land management practices and also bring resources that will protect the land surrounding the chimpanzees in the Gombe Reserve. As incomes of these farmers rise, they can plant more shade trees to improve soil fertility and quality of their coffee. Outside of the Gombe park reserve, most of the land is dedicated to one cash-crop - coffee growing — and currently with little shade cover or good water management . Doing it as a business model in a partnership with the farmer cooperative, we could create a self sustaining model that generated its own revenue to continue the development work of farmer training, new technologies, agronomy education, sales and exporting, and the other things that this co-op is challenged by.
I listen to the staff to find out what it has been like to work on this project. There is a reason that this region has been so underdeveloped, and it has much to do with the culture and a dependency on aid that seems to envelope the country. Nearly half of the Tanzania national development budget comes from donor groups, and it has created a culture of dependency that makes any market-based, or business based project even more difficult. It is clearly the hardest place to work with coffee grower out of all the regions that I have visited. It is such abject poverty, one cannot believe how poor the people are in certain parts. It is quite simply an entire world of difference from what I’ve seen in the Americas or Asia. I see it as we pass mud hut fishing villages on the way from Kigoma to the Gombe. There is no electricity, running water, or even much in terms of agriculture. The hills above the fishing villages is erroding, from the people ripping out the trees. In the raining season, Genevieve tells me, the rains create landslide that engulf the huts like the ones I see on the shore, and many die. There are no media stories about this problem, and it appears no end to this cycle of environmental degredation then creating more poverty. I feel helpless as I watch the children on the shore, still yelling to us in Swahili and splashing about in the waves. The enormity of the problem at hand almost makes you want to turn around and go home - pretending that you never really saw this or understood what you were really seeing.
But then you look t the project that Sara, Genevieve and the agronomists of Thangale, Boss and Hamis have put together in the matter of 18 months. With a relatively small budget, in terms of typical development projects, this coffee project has done things that very few people in Kigoma thought could be done. Eight washing stations were built, with new technologies from Colombia to process the coffee cherry with 10x less water and at the same time improve the taste of the coffee because of the consistency the machines provide. I visited one of the washing stations in a village called Kalinzi, and it nearly took my breath away when I saw dozens of farmers bringing their coffee cherry to the machine, and then lay the finished parchment on to racks of drying table. In a shed were dozens and dozens of bags of golden, dried coffee still in its parchment casing, waiting until it is time to have a truck come by and take the coffee to the dry mill to be processed for the Sustainable Harvest roaster customers, like Allegro Whole Foods, and the new ones this year joining in - Dillanos, and Cafe Moto in San Diego, La Mill in Los Angeles, Batdorf in Olympia, WA, PT’s Coffee Roasting Co. in Topeka. I’m sure as more roasters and their customers taste the coffee out of these newly constructed coffee washing stations– like the new crop coffees that I cupped yesterday — they’ll be amazed how the coffee is improving with consistency. And with growth in the coffee volume, this idea for a coffee-driven development project can become self sustaining, without the need for more venture funds that Lemelson Foundation has provided for us in these first several years. Everyone I meet here in Tanzania tells me this a new, and radical idea. People like Fritz, who has come here to see how our model works.
Fritz has told me that in his experience, this is a very unusual economic development model we’re trying - rare because it is done by us bringing together all the value chain partners and because it is driven by market demand with a focus on quality to improve income. He hopes we can replicate it in other places. But he sees how hard it will be - given so many challenges ahead. The key for me is to stay optimistic and keep finding the good people to collaborate with. So far we’ve connected with the right partners on both sides of the world. As I meet more people on my stay in Kigoma, I realize from how they react to the work we’ve done, that the important thing is to keep going forward and find a way to make it all work…
- David
As of this morning, the official equipment sponsors of the World Barista Championship were announced. We at PT’s, having been involved in this event since 2001, are proud to share the news that Nuova Simonelli’s Aurelia was was chosen to be the official espresso machine through the 2011 season of this, and all SCAA USBC events. We have been big fans of the Aurelia since we brought it into our equipment line in 2006. It’s a very impressive piece of equipment that has proven to pull some of the more extraordinary shots of espresso that many of us have ever seen. Below is the official press release and follow this for a video presentation of the announcement in London.
