By Stephany Escamilla Femat
Mexico is the northernmost coffee-growing country in the Americas. Something distinguishing Mexican coffee from other countries is that more than 90% of it is produced under shade, with cover ranging from 50% to 84%.
That is the reason behind the name “coffee forests”. This peculiarity has allowed us to be resilient to the ups and downs of prices on the international market and the growing and more noticeable problems that climate change has brought, such as the increase of pests and diseases, frosts, and droughts.
Another wealth of our country is its people
Cultural diversity amounts to 11 linguistic families, 68 languages, and 364 variants. In the coffee-growing areas, there are 38 different native cultures.
We can say that coffee preserves a large part of our ancestral culture. It is no coincidence that several Presidia or Slow Food Communities in Mexico exist in coffee-growing areas, where diversity and biodiversity result in our great gastronomic richness.
Several initiatives in Mexico have aimed to differentiate the production of coffees from cultivation practices that care for the environment. Today, the Coffee Coalition represents a new proposal to differentiate products from the production plots to the roaster and final customer, ensuring the chain has solid links and guaranteeing good, clean, and fair precepts throughout the transformation.
In this context, Mexico has joined the ideology embodied in the Manifesto of the Coffee Coalition, touching base on commitments, purposes, and actions related to the sustainability of production systems. It finds its grounds in a simple logic of awareness of establishing harmonious relationships with nature and between people.
In this way, a product as emblematic worldwide as coffee ceases to be a simple commodity and becomes a vehicle for communication and transmission of joint actions to achieve a better quality of life for all those involved.
This year, Mexico will place its first batch of Good, Clean and Fair Coffee at Terra Madre 2022 ly. These producers belong to the original Nahua people and are members of the Community Forest, Fog, and Coffee Xalapa, located in the State of Veracruz. This small achievement opens a path that we hope many communities in Mexico will follow to access international markets and strengthen local trade and consumption networks within the country.