In 2004, Lavazza set up a project involving three coffee-growing communities in Honduras, Peru and Colombia. Tierra – as the project is called – seeks to help these highly impoverished communities to improve their living standards and the quality of their coffee, to find ways of selling it on more advantageous and competitive terms, and to achieve greater financial independence while using environment-friendly techniques.
In just over two years, the three communities were able to provide evidence of their compliance with principles of sustainability, which relate not only to the environment but also to living and working conditions. The project has included the construction of a green coffee drying and processing plant, and the renovation and construction of homes, schools and clinics.
Lavazza shared with the farmers the coffee-processing expertise acquired during its hundred-year history. Reconverting production styles designed around an old concept of quality demonstrates foresight on the part of companies, and is the right direction for finding sustainable development. Tierra is a joint field of action that brings together production, consumption, farming and gastronomy. The project was developed with valuable advice from Volcafé, one of the world’s principal coffee-exporters
The project is based on a conviction that social development and economic growth are not mutually exclusive, and that the host countries’ environmental, social and cultural norms must be respected if this growth is to be compatible with the protection of natural resources.
“Since 2004, the Tierra project has gone from strength to strength,” said Clyde Attard, marketing manager for P. Cutajar and Co Ltd, importers and distributors of Lavazza. “In view of its success, the enthusiastic response it has received, and the fact that it is continuously evolving, Lavazza is now looking at future measures, to continue developing its corporate responsibility in an area from where it sources coffee.”
The fact that Tierra is directly managed makes it unusually flexible, so its progress can be monitored and new objectives set on an ongoing basis. Mario Cerruti, Lavazza’s supply chain director and the project’s manager, says it has two main aims: to provide guidance on coffee production, and to improve the lives of the growers. It must also allow sufficient time for people affected by change to adapt, and to make their own priorities known.
Ultimately, Tierra is about bridging the gap between producers and consumers of food and drink, because the future lies in returning to traditional high standards of quality, taking a long-term view and making sustainable development a reality.
“We’re in South America, a paradise of biodiversity and a place of great environmental, social and financial contrasts,” said Mario Cerruti. “Here, horses and mules are the means of locomotion, the machete an essential everyday tool, the landscape one of small farms, tumbledown villages, coffee plantations, jungles, deep-blue lakes, and mountains. Here on the equator, night falls abruptly, at the same time every day. Each time we plunge a spoon into a cup of steaming liquid and stir, our lives and theirs are intersecting.”
“Theirs is a world of back-breaking labour, big sacks of beans and potholed roads. The Tierra project has inspired these very diverse people with a single conviction: change may be difficult, but not impossible.”