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Positive News was handed the guardianship of Global Village News and Resources in summer of 2004. Although we would like to continue to make the archives available to subscribers and readers we would like to point out that stories published prior to issue 89 were not under our editorial guidance and would like to make a distinction that these are not necessarily a reflection of the current opinions of our editorial team. Cyber Sales Offers Hope To Coffee Farmers
Modeled after the world's first Internet coffee auction in Brazil in 1999, they were confident African coffee producers could offer their product in the same way. "The essence of our plan is to create the premier Internet commodity exchange to support trade in African soft commodities such as tea, coffee, cocoa and macadamia," Gitau said. Ueshima Coffee Co. of Japan paid $453 each for two 110-pound bags -- $106 more than the same coffee earned on the trading floor at Nairobi's weekly auction. For Gitau and Njukia, coffee is close to home. Both are from coffee-farming families in central Kenya. Proceeds from coffee grown during Kenya's heyday in the 1960s and '70s paid for their educations at the University of Southern California and Texas Tech. But Kenya's coffee production, 65 percent of which comes from farms of half an acre or smaller, has declined by half over the past decade. Critics say this has been largely due to mismanagement and corruption in the coffee cooperatives and on the government coffee board. Farmers, most of whom have had no way of knowing what their coffee sells for at auction, wait for months to get paid by the cooperatives. They also say the cooperatives cut earnings even further by charging them for fertilizer, pesticide and fungicide they often never receive. Gitau and Njukia are convinced they can get payments to farmers in 24 hours. They are looking for $1.25 million in venture capital to set up a proper exchange, a laboratory to verify coffee quality and an information network to let farmers know about prices in Nairobi and around the world. "What the market is looking for is consistency, and this depends on the farmer being paid regularly and promptly," Njukia said. (Adapted from an article by Patrick Majute, AP News: www.startribune.com/stories/535/2903924.html) |
KENYA -
Coffee is Kenya's fourth-largest earner of foreign exchange, so when
coffee is in trouble, Kenya is in trouble. Americans are paying up to $4
a pop at Starbucks for a latte made of Kenya's finest arabica coffee
while farmers in Kenya have been uprooting trees because there was no
money in the crop. Something was wrong with this picture, and Titus
Gitau, a 34-year-old Kenyan entrepreneur, got it. It was the lack of
demand, which was high in the USA, Europe and Japan. It was the
distribution system in which all the profit was eaten by the many levels
of middlemen. Working with the Specialty Coffee Association of America,
the two helped set up the East African Fine Coffee Association and held
their first on-line coffee auction in April 2002 on