During our visit to Bangalore, we attended the India International Coffee Festival 2007 in order to learn more about Indian Coffee and to present the Fair Tracing Project to interested producers.
The festival began with a welcome address from Krishna Rau, the current Chairman of the Coffee Board of India followed by several other speakers including Shri Jairam Ramesh, the Minister of State for Commerce.
On the second day the Fair Tracing team was invited to present the project to the audience. As a part of the “Coffee Differentiation for Value Enhancement” session, Ian Brown and Ann Light presented the aims and goals of Fair Tracing and invited coffee producers to work with us on the project.
The session was followed by “Coffee Quality and Sustainability” with producers from Kenya, Costa Rica and India talking about the challenges and problems they encounter during their work. One speaker was Bose Mandanna, a coffee planter from Coorg, the largest coffee growing district in the country and former Vice Chairman of the Coffee Board who kindly invited the Fair Tracing team to visit his plantation the following week. Another was Dr Adolfo Lizano-Gonzalez, deputy executive director at the Instituto Del Cafe de Costa Rica. Mr Mandanna and Dr Lizano-Gonzalez described a range of information on the environmental impact of coffee farms that could be included in a product information system: the range of wildlife sheltered by plants, methods of rainfall management, whether processing water and pulp are reused and filtered, and the impact of farms as “carbon sinks” under the Kyoto treaty. With Dr Joseph Kimemia, director of research at Kenya’s Coffee Research Foundation, they also discussed social impact indicators such as the average level of worker income, education and housing provided to workers’ families, and the provision of micro credit to grower communities. Mr Mario Cerutti, director of Luigi Lavazza Spa, described his company’s ¡Tierra! project, which certifies minimum environmental and social standards for coffee suppliers.
The last day of the conference was about the image of coffee, including speakers such as Dr. Ernesto Illy the Honorary Chairman of Illycaffe, Italy and Dr. Sylvia Robert-Sargeant from Positively Coffee.
The Coffee Festival provided a great opportunity for the Fair Tracing team to learn more about Indian coffee and the challenges and problems the planters encounter. Furthermore, we were able to present the project and discuss it with people who are involved in producing and distributing Indian coffee — vital to our participative design process. We are working to build strong partnerships with a number of organisations we met during our visit.