DAY 6 - Cochabamba’s coffee farmers
Relatively few people have tried Bolivia’s elegant and generally light coffee, with its slightly tea-like profile. But coffee from Cochabamba is such a rarity that even many Bolivians have never heard of it. Yet I believe that one day, some of Bolivia’s most exciting coffee beans will come from Cochabamba. Yes, probably not every year, because that is simply how natural products work, but more often than you would expect given the tiny volumes this microregion produces.
Still, we need to start this story at the beginning. Bolivia went through major changes in the early 1950s. Following the Bolivian National Revolution of 1952, the large estates dating back to colonial times were dismantled, and much of the land was distributed to local farmers. These reforms also led a considerable number of miners and farmers from the Potosí region to settle in the tropical parts of Cochabamba. Mining was declining in importance, and Potosí is hardly the most suitable region for agriculture. So many people went in search of more fertile soil and a better climate, and before long, the little village of San José was born.
Coffee was still a long way off. Vegetables and pumpkins remain the main source of income in these villages to this day. But in 2013, Bolivia’s coffee sector was hit by a crisis when a disease known as roya, or coffee leaf rust, devastated much of the country’s coffee plantations. To help restore production, the government began offering coffee seedlings and training to anyone interested in growing coffee.
The farmers of San José seized the opportunity. Pumpkin and potato prices had always been unstable, and farmers were looking for ways to spread their risks. If seedlings were being handed out, why not give it a try? The first coffee plots appeared on the mountain slopes. And little by little, coffee growing is taking root in Cochabamba. The high coffee prices of recent years and growing interest in Bolivian coffee have also encouraged farmers to expand their plots, bringing production to perhaps twenty tonnes today.
But the reality is that Cochabamba still does not really exist as a coffee region in its own right. There is not a single functioning coffee processing centre in the area. Each farmer processes their own coffee and then usually sells it to a local buyer or cooperative, often just a hundred kilos at a time. The already small volumes are fragmented, and only a handful of bags of exclusively Cochabamba-grown coffee have ever made it out of Bolivia.
No, this does not mean that the coffee farmers of San José are in dire straits. Demand for Bolivian coffee currently seems to exceed supply, and nobody struggles to find someone who will eventually buy their beans. The city of Cochabamba alone, with its million inhabitants, drinks far more coffee than the local farmers grow. There are no insurmountable logistical challenges here, and quality, although variable, does not differ significantly from the average in Yungas, where more than 90% of Bolivia’s coffee comes from. So what are we doing here with our motto, “we start where others stop”?
Yes, Cochabamba is a slightly different kind of project for Renegade too. Here, our aim is not to help struggling farmers, but to polish a diamond. Although Cochabamba’s coffee-growing history is still very short, volumes are small and quality is inconsistent, we believe that the distinctive climate and high altitudes of tropical Cochabamba create the conditions for some of Bolivia’s most sought-after beans to come from here in the future.
Unfortunately, there are not yet many people who share that belief, so the conditions needed to bring out the full potential we see in these beans are still missing. Without the necessary infrastructure or demand specifically for quality coffee from Cochabamba, local smallholders have neither the means nor the incentive to produce it.
But we do tend to dive head first into somewhat uncharted waters. After all, if nobody starts exploring, we will never find out how deep they really are. We were already too late this year, but next year, together with local partners, we will set up the first small coffee wet mill in San José and take it from there. A central processing facility will help ensure consistent quality and bring together larger volumes of coffee, making exports more practical. And in time, it will hopefully become our little Renegade coffee laboratory, where we can experiment with different coffee varieties and processing methods to discover just how far Cochabamba’s coffee can go. Just as we have done with Georgian tea.
And well, perhaps it will be an interesting journey for others to follow too.
