The first five months of the year are usually the most difficult for our small-scale banana farmer partners due to weather difficulties. Problems due to the rainy season are expected. However, what’s happening this year is unusual. The intensity of the rains has put our farmer partners and the Oké USA banana team against new challenges that we were unprepared for. There has been a lot of creative problem solving and last minute decision making in order to fulfill orders on time. In these challenging times, we do everything on our end in order to support our farmer partners by: coordinating with shipping lines, giving credit to buy inputs such as boxes, and supporting staff through logistics and technical assistance, all in order to help them harvest the fruit and fulfill orders on time.
Categories: Farmer Partners
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Mildred AlvaradoMarch 13, 2017Last October, we welcomed organic banana farmer Mariana Cobos to the Twin Cities to celebrate our 10 year anniversary importing bananas from AsoGuabo Cooperative in Ecuador. “I would like to express my gratitude for the opportunity to tell my story about the true history of small-scale banana farmers,” Mariana said during the visit. That story is filled with the difficulties, the challenges, and the inequity that small-scale farmers face.
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Ashley SymonsMarch 7, 2017Carly Kadlec is the Green Coffee Buyer at Equal Exchange, and one of the women that inspires me in our work toward trade justice. I’ve been fortunate to travel with Carly on visits to coffee farms in Honduras and Guatemala. Since March 8 is International Women’s Day, I wanted to sit down with Carly and talk about her work with coffee producers ... but, she’s on the road, as she often is, so we bring you this Q&A, across 2,500 miles.
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Leif Rawson-AhernFebruary 28, 2017Equal Exchange has worked in the tea industry for more than 20 years. Our tea program is still relatively small, but we have leveraged our limited volume to support and strengthen a number of small-scale farmer groups in India and Sri Lanka. Small farmer cooperatives are incredible rare in the tea industry which was built on colonial plantations from the ground up. When considering the larger industry context, it is remarkable that our small-scale tea co-op partners exist at all.
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Equal ExchangeNovember 30, 2016It may seem like a distant memory at this point, but you may recall that Ecuador was hit by a 7.8 magnitude earthquake in April of 2016. The epicenter of the earthquake was located near the town of Muisne – a community that is part of our partner organization UOPROCAE, or the Union of Producers of Cacao of Arriba Esmeraldas. One of the cities that suffered the worst infrastructure damage was Portoviejo, close to our other cacao partner organization Fortaleza del Valle. We reached out immediately to both groups and were very relieved to learn that there were no fatalities among the members and staff of the UOPROCAE or Fortaleza del Valle. However, damage to personal property and the property belonging to the farmer organizations is significant and will be slow to fully rebuild.
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Jessica Jones-HughesNovember 23, 2016Four years ago, the Equal Exchange banana team launched an avocado program knowing little about the avocado market and the realities of the industry in the U.S. We started our work in avocados because we met a small farmer co-op fighting for market access in an industry where farmer voices were absent. Equal Exchange has always had a non-traditional approach in the way that we craft our producer relationships and introduce new products. Not the typical, “there is a need in the market, let’s fill it;” instead we build through relationships.
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Phyllis_RobinsonOctober 20, 2016Do you regularly purchase avocados at your local grocery store? If so, have you noticed that it was not possible to purchase avocados from Mexico during the first two weeks of October? Are you curious what’s behind this disruption in supply?
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Carly KadlecApril 12, 2016As organic farmers, many of our partners are especially susceptible to the multitude of environmental threats brought on by climate change. These new challenges, including the recent prevalence of the destructive fungus known as coffee leaf rust, are a real danger to the productivity of organic farms and the livelihoods of the people who rely on coffee.
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