Coffee!

Well, I haven't been being super productive with homework, so I figured I would be productive in updating my blog. This post is about, as you may have guessed, coffee! The coffee in Costa Rica is amazing. I'm pretty sure I'm going to have to go through a caffeine detox when I get home (as well as a sugar detox, since Costa Ricans like everything sweet).

Two weeks ago I got to go with my Spanish class to tour the Santa Maria de Dota Coffee Co-op. Coffee is the second largest source of revenue for Costa Rica (next to tourism), so we had group projects on coffee for our Spanish class (mine was on the history of coffee, which is really interesting) and took a "gira" or tour, of the coffee farm two Saturdays ago. There we learned about how they grow coffee and how they roast it, and got to see and sample different coffee drinks made by professional baristas. All or nearly all of the coffee grown is of high quality, mostly because it is grown at a higher altitude: higher altitude=higher quality. The co-op we visited uses sustainable methods of farming coffee, which includes growing shade trees among the plants. This keeps direct sun off the coffee plants, and provides more nutrients for the soil. You'll see a lot of coffee fields on hills in Costa Rica that are just coffee, completely stripped of trees, but that method isn't as good for the land, and produces coffee of lower quality.

After touring the co-op, we met up with this guy named Arturo, who's a private coffee farmer in that same area. He's Tican (Costa Rican) but lived in the US for a few years, so his English was pretty good. Arturo grows organic coffee, and is kind of an advocate for organic coffee farming. He explained to us how the traditional methods of growing coffee (like the shadeless coffee farms and using chemicals for fertilizers and pesticides) isn't sustainable, and in the future the land will be useless for farming. Also, the use of chemicals on the plants can be dangerous for the people who work in the fields, since coffee is tended and harvested by hand. The problem is, organic coffee is more expensive to grow, which is why a lot of people don't do it. But Arturo says he grows organic because he thinks it's the right thing to do, for the land and for his children and future generations. He was very passionate about everything he talked about.

Next he took us to the house of some of his neighbors, who are indigenous Costa Ricans and work on a coffee farm. There he explained about another project he's working on, which has to do with a stove. He told us that about half the women in the world cook over an open fire, the smoke of which not only contributes to global warming, but also is breathed in by the people, especially women and children, tending the fires, causing lung cancer and other respiratory diseases. So there is a company, based in Seattle, Washington, that has created what they call a "Estufa finca" or "Farm Stove." It's a very simple contraption that looks like a metal bucket with holes punched in the bottom and surrounded by a layer of rippled metal, but it's pretty incredible. It will burn a small amount of biomass (sticks, leaves, etc.) for hours, because it also burns the smoke it creates. And because it burns its own smoke, it releases hardly any into the air. It needs hardly any tending, only uses a small amount of wood, reduces the emissions of toxic gases into the air, and only costs about $40 to make. Pretty cool, huh? So anyway, Arturo is helping this company make and deliver the stoves to indigenous families in Costa Rica, and the people have really taken to them. Apparently the company recently received a grant to further test the stove to see how much it really reduces emissions, and also to see if native peoples are willing to make the switch from an open fire. Here's a link to their website if you want to learn more:

http://seachar.org/wordpress/?page_id=2

The trip was interesting, and I learned a lot. It definitely made me think about where my coffee comes from!