USAID Trains Sons and Daughters of Coffee Farmers to Monitor Quality

· First Group of Junior Cuppers Graduate

· $1.7 million USAID Quality Coffee Program Helps 2,000 farmers improve quality and sales

Jinotega , Nicaragua — When Ingrid Cornejo sips a cup of coffee she is now likely to use words like citric , chocolaty or herbal to describe the flavor. She also has another set of words for a bad cup of coffee. “If it has a taste like dirt, fermentation, mold, or medicine, it’s defective,” she said.

These are just a couple of the new skills that Ingrid learned during a USAID course that trained 20 young farmers as “junior cuppers.” Like most of her fellow graduates, 17-year-old Ingrid grew up on a family-run coffee farm and already knew something about growing and processing coffee. Now, as a cupper ,she will be able to provide quality control and technical advice for her family and other growers in the mountainous coffee-growing community of San Juan del Rio Coco.

Ingrid’s family grows certified organic coffee, and her father is a member of the CORCASAN Cooperative, one of seven farmers’ organizations receiving assistance under USAID’s $1.7 million Quality Coffee Program. The program is helping small and medium scale producers increase the quality of their coffee in order to sell in the higher paying specialty and organic coffee market. The 2,000 coffee growers participating in the program have already exported 345,000 lbs. of specialty coffee since the program began in 2003. The Quality Coffee program also supports the activities of three faith-based organizations: World Relief, Catholic Relief Services, and Lutheran World Relief –that assist farmers to improve coffee quality, and promote marketing campaigns with their faith-based communities in the United States . This year the U.S. company Starbucks will buy 20,000 qq of specialty coffee, with a value of $2 million, from a group of farmers participating in the World Relief program under USAID’s Quality Coffee Program.

USAID began helping Nicaragua ’s small and medium scale coffee growers to raise quality and to produce organic coffee several years ago through a program with the Cooperative League of the United States of America (CLUSA). The USAID/CLUSA program financed 21 laboratories and trained 65 sons and daughters of coffee farmers as cuppers to monitor coffee quality. These labs are located on the farms or at the offices of the cooperatives that continue to receive assistance. Many international coffee buyers say these labs are helping Nicaragua produce excellent coffee. And some of the cuppers trained by the USAID/CLUSA program are now professionals , including Lexania Marin, who was the teacher for the Junior Cupper course.

“The course was excellent,” said Ingrid Cornejo, “Now I can help the cooperative and my family to produce the best coffee.”