There’s more to this cup than just coffee

"For the price of one cup of coffee, you can help save a life."

Admittedly sentimental and sweeping, the Figaro Foundation Corporation has successfully provided a sliver of hope to Filipino coffee farmers by believing in this simple principle. The social development arm of the Figaro Coffee Company has brought a mission to every cup of Figaro coffee sold in two of its busiest outlets: that a simple choice of buying a cup of coffee to take can sustain the lives of the many Filipino coffee farmers.

How does this happen? All after tax profits from every cup of coffee, every bag of beans, every sandwich or pastry sold at the Figaro café at the Cultural Center of the Philippines and the Figaro cart at GMA-7 fund the projects of the Figaro Foundation.

And what has all that coffee and pastries accomplished?

In just a little over six years, at least 500 coffee farmers in Cavite, Benguet, Ifugao and Kalinga harvested their coffee trees this year to provide Figaro Coffee consumers the best Filipino coffee our country has to offer.

Since 2003, the Adopt-a-Farm program of the foundation and the municipal government of Amadeo, Cavite have turned 180 hectares of idle land into productive coffee farms. At least 140,000 coffee trees have been planted or rejuvenated in the small coffee town of Amadeo alone, and more coffee farmers have gone back to tending abandoned coffee farms.

In 2004, the Figaro Foundation and the Land Bank of the Philippines with the support of the Agricultural Credit Policy Council at the Department of Agriculture banded together to bring to five coffee farming cooperatives in Ifugao and Kalinga information on producing quality coffee through organic farming techniques.

Just last month the first trading activity was implemented. Representatives of the foundation drove more than 38 hours through rough mountainous roads, traveling from Manila to Pinukpuk and Mananig in Kalinga, then down to Kiangan and Lagawe in Ifugao and back to the Figaro warehouse in Manila with the first load of organically grown Robusta. As an incentive to the farmers, the foundation paid a premium over current market prices per kilogram of coffee on the condition that the coffee delivered to Figaro was of good quality as per the training they had earlier received from Figaro Foundation on how to produce a good quality batch of coffee.

Later this year, the Figaro Foundation together with the German Development Service in a supporting partnership to this project will continue training activities for the farmers in organic farming with an organic coffee adviser from Germany.

At the end of the exercise, Figaro hopes to establish an efficient trading relationship with the coffee farming cooperatives to ensure a steady supply of quality organic coffee, as well as to help encourage farmers to care once again for their coffee which used to be abandoned, growing wild and of little use to farmers or coffee consumers.

While it’s nice to know that the cup of coffee you’re enjoying is helping local coffee farmers, coffee enthusiasts can do even more.

The Figaro Foundation organizes coffee tours around the months of January to March and July to August to mark the two major seasons in the life of a coffee tree: the harvest and planting seasons.

During the harvest season of February and March, farm tours take participants on a bean-to-cup tour illustrating the life of a coffee bean before it comes to the consumer in its brewed form. On the itinerary is a short trek through a coffee forest, visits to several small coffee farms and stops along the way that show coffee being harvested, dried and milled.

On the eight farm tours conducted since 2000, about 400 participants have had the chance to come up close and personal with the coffee bean.

Tree planting tours are for the more adventurous coffee enthusiasts as we take volunteers to our pilot farms during the monsoon months of July through September for a few hours of leisurely planting of coffee trees in our growing number of coffee pilot farms. The tours are held in farms as close by as Cavite to as far up as Benguet.

Tree planting this year is slated for a couple of Saturdays in August in our new Barako pilot farm in Bgy. Maymangga, Amadeo, Cavite.

There have been eight tree planting tours since 2000. Each tour can plant from a minimum of 200 seedlings up to 1,000 seedlings, therefore total tree count is close to 6,000.

If you can’t muster up the energy to dig in the dirt and plant trees, you can sponsor a seedling and one of the volunteers at our tree planting tours can plant the tree for you. You’ll miss out on the thrill of actually planting the tree that will give you the beans for that wonderful cup in the future, but it’s still a good way to help rebuild our national coffee output.

The Figaro Foundation preaches the message of Filipino coffee and seeks to bring back the glory days. In the 1800s we were the fourth largest coffee producer in the world, helped by the fact that the coffee leaf rust infestation pagued many of the other coffee producing countries around the world. As recently as the 1980s our coffee exports still earned us US$150 million a year. But then a significant drop in world coffee prices saw large areas of coffee farms being planted instead to higher-yielding cash crops like mangoes and bananas, or converted to commercial, industrial or residential use. By 1990 only 120,000 hectares remained planted to coffee, mostly in the areas of Batangas, Bukidnon, Benguet, Cavite, Kalinga, Apayao, Davao and Claveria.

We may not have been planting much coffee but we were certainly drinking–and drinking a lot of it too. Local coffee consumption is estimated to have increased by three percent every year, and 2003 figures put local consumption at 60,000 metric tons, with local production meeting less than half that amount at only 27,000 metric tons. Estimated coffee imports reached US$36 million.

Fortunately, the Figaro Foundation has found many willing partners in its efforts to revive and promote Filipino coffee. The Mount Malarayat Golf and Country Club, for example, has a pilot organic coffee farm within its lush, manicured property in Lipa, Batangas. The Benguet State University, on the other hand, has carved out an organic farm of Arabica coffee on its popular terraces.

There are as many ways to help the coffee effort as there re ways to enjoy a fine cup of coffee. The Figaro Foundation invites everyone–coffee drinker or not–to help Save the Barako. Check out www.savethebarako.org and enjoy your next cup!