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(Narrator) Throughout the world, over 25 million people earn their living by
growing coffee.
The vast majority of these farmers are paid only once a year after they have
delivered their coffee.
For the rest of the year,
farmers and their families are often forced to stretch their money and their
food supply until the next year's harvest. The result is seasonal hunger, an
experience so common that, from Mexico to South America,
it has its own name.
"Los Meses Flacos"
"The Thin Months"
"Increasingly, our global trading system has leaned toward the specialized
production of commodities.
Which is very efficient in certain ways, but it does bring considerably
higher levels of risk in certain remote areas where farmers cannot readily depend
on markets, on viable markets
to secure food,
because they're all growing much the same thing in a region.
So the risk is elevated when you're dealing with commodities of any
sort. Coffee is one of them, but all of them face same challenge."
One of the key strategies in fighting hunger
is helping coffee farmers return to a more diversified farm.
Coffee cooperatives, non-profits, and the specialty coffee industry are supporting
pilot projects that teach fruit and vegetable production, food preservation
techniques, and how to market what they produce locally as an additional source
of income.
A three-year project headed by the international non-profit, "Save the
Children," is helping 750 families in northern Nicaragua.
Many of these families live on less than one dollar a day.
Critical to their survival is the ability to grow food, as well as coffee.
Here, the practice of creating home gardens is being reintroduced.
"Save the Children" is supporting families with training and with seeds.
"The whole specialty coffee industry is focused on quality.
And I think companies need to step back and take a look at basis of quality.
Families who are growing specialty coffee, particularly small-scale farmers, will invest in
quality only after they are able to feed their own families. They're not going to feed their
coffee plants before they feed their families.
So this is the challenge, we have an industry that's very focused on
sustainability, and yet here's something that is just so fundamental to life,
and also to quality coffee,
that it really needs to be dealt with on an industry-wide scale."
(Narrator) The thin months arrive with the rainy season in Central America.
While the landscape is lush,
farmers' pockets are by now, almost empty.
Heavy rains and frequent landslides make it difficult for farmers to grow their own
food or to get it to market.
The food that is available,
is often beyond the farmer's reach.
Heifer International is a global non-profit dedicated to ending hunger
and poverty
through a community-based partnership approach.
In Southern Mexico, Heifer's working directly with coffee-growing communities
to diversify their sources of food and income, so they are not completely
dependent on coffee.
"If your business partner, in any business was
starving, was facing periods of chronic malnutrition and illness,
would you not be interested
in addressing that?
So once we know, once we see these hidden causes,
I think it's incumbent upon us to do something about it, if we're calling ourselves partners.
Working with them,
providing what they need,
really makes a difference in the long run.
It's what distinguishes real developmental impact
from charity."