Tegucigalpa, Honduras

Tuesday brings a refreshingly early start for the flight from San Salvador to Tegucigalpa, Honduras. If we weren’t fully awake, the landing at the infamous Tegucigalpa airport is guaranteed to change that; not even shaving the top off the local mountain has made the approach to landing any less thrilling.

La Central

We’re met by Jimmy Navarro from the Central de Cooperativas Cafeteleras de Honduras (La Central), a national network of coffee producing cooperatives throughout the ten departments of Honduras, representing over 6000 small farmers and their families. Formed in 1997, it aims to export its member’s coffee directly and to support rural development, thorough the improvement of amenities, sanitation, education and the provision of financial services.

La Central produces and exports a range of branded coffees, each with different taste profiles and certification which assists in marketing the coffee in Europe. The primary cooperatives – each with their smallholder members – have varying combinations of certification from organic to Fairtrade, Rainforest Alliance and Utz Kapeh each of which attract a premium and financial rewards.

Firstly, Jimmy takes up by truck to the hotel so we can drop off our luggage. The journey proves highly surreal as we approach a police barricade and a rather sizeable handful of soldiers and suited heavies guarding the hotel’s street. Jimmy informs us that Hugo Chavez, the anti-American President of Venezuela, is due to arrive at any minute so it’s almost a surprise that we’re permitted to pass. We hang on to catch a close glimpse, but sadly he’s late and we have farmers to visit.

Parque Nacional La Tigra

The La Tigra national park, with its cloud forest and abundant array of flora and fauna, is just 30km from Tegucigalpa and absolutely stunning.

The La Tigra brand of coffee is grown by the small cooperatives local to this area, all of whom are members of La Central. La Tigra coffee is organically grown under Rainforest Alliance Certified conditions and the farmers enjoy the benefits of the Fairtrade minimum price and Fairtrade premiums for social development.

We have a wonderfully rustic lunch at the Pulperia Rosario, which enjoys excellent views over the valley and deep into the heart of the national park. The mining town of Rosario developed around the excavation of gold and silver deposits, and the dilapidated buildings here reflect that period of activity.

Finca San Juancito, La Tigra

Driving further up the mountain track into the coffee growing areas, it’s a perfect opportunity to jump into the back of the pick-up and absorb the landscape. We arrive at Finca San Juancito, a small organic farm and member of the local COMISAHUL cooperative. Harvesting of the coffee cherries is underway, and much of the fruit looks welcomingly ripe on the trees.

(Nb the cherries on the tree do not all ripen at once, making harvesting more labour intensive as pickers must return to the trees over a period of weeks. High quality coffee relies on only the ripe fruit being harvested, but unfortunately it is common to see unripe fruit harvested which can seriously inhibit the quality of the crop, primarily because pickers are usually paid by volume. The best farmers encourage pickers to only select ripe cherries a  nd often financial incentives to do so).

The recently processed coffee - which, to the credit of the farmer, looks excellent - is drying on tables, where it is frequently raked and turned. The “beneficio” or wet mill, where the coffee beans are separated from the cherry using water, is a fine example of good farm  management. The waste cherry skins are being composted and the waste water from the processing (which is essentially polluting if dumped straight back onto the land or flowing into water courses) enters into small treatment channels.

The short tour concludes with the farmer cutting some of his sugar cane for us to chew on. Juicily delicious it’s worth noting, but not great for the teeth!

COMISAJUL cooperative, La Tigra

We head back down the mountainside to meet with some of the key members of the COMISAJUL primary cooperative, itself a member of La Central and producers of La Tigra coffee. It’s proves to be a rewarding way of finding out what the aspirations of the cooperatives are and how they really benefit from coffee premiums. It also gave us the chance to show the farmers exactly where there coffee was being sold and how it is packaged and presented.

Tegucigalpa

Back in the capital, an evening out at a traditional restaurant finishes the day nicely particularly as some ice-cold beers are on hand.

Local Beers

Imperial – there’s just no competition here. I tried all of the different local beers when I last came in 2005 and this is by far the best. Has a nice logo on the bottle too.