PRODUCTION OF ORGANIC AND SUSTAINABLE COFFEE

As an alternative to the protracted stages of price crises for our product, since 1993 we started to promote the production, processing and marketing of organic and sustainable coffee. With this program, we set out to achieve the following goals:

To restore and preserve elements of the environment (water, soil, air, biodiversity of plants and animals) and prevent their deterioration, as well as to prevent and avoid environmental pollution within coffee-growing communities.

To restore, improve, and maintain levels of soil fertility in our fields.

To seek the recognition the benefits that our systems for producing organic coffee provide for the environment.

To gain and maintain organic certification.

To manage the certification of shade-grown coffee.

To restore and raise levels of production per hectare, and to preserve and improve the quality of coffee.

To gain access to and markets and consolidate and expand our presence in international markets for organic and sustainable coffee.

To gain access to and consolidate our presenc in the domestic market and obtain the recognition that we deserve and local, regional and national levels.

To improve sales of certified organic and fair trade coffee.

To contribute to job retention and the use of the coffee-growing families' labor in the workforce.

The effort to achieve the agricultural shift towards organic techniques has been difficult, since it involves changing growing practices that have been around for many years and maintaining a very detailed record of production in order to monitor and track production, these are prerequisites for getting certification and thus gaining access to the market for certified organic products.

Faced with the latest "great price crash," the most recent strategy implemented by CEPCO to achieve market success has been to differentiate its coffee, presenting it as a total-quality product based on the combination of a number of concepts, such as certification as organic, ecologically friendly, shade grown, bird-friendly, and fair trade.

Thus, the proposal is to achieve commercial recognition of the coffees that meet the following conditions:
Special coffee of high quality,
Organic coffee, which protects the health of its consumers,
Coffee that preserves the environment where it is produced, and
Coffee that ensures the livelihoods of the families that produce it, these characteristics as a whole are called "sustainable coffee"