Karla Boza on the Realities of Coffee Farming [081]

A few weeks ago, I was honored to attend Re:co, a coffee convention that invites speakers from all over the world to talk about these big ideas in coffee. This year's conversation was focused on coffee prices and the crisis that we face as the price of coffee dips lower and lower. I talked to the head of the Coffee Price Crisis Response Initiative a few weeks ago. If you want more context on that, listen to the Ric Rhinehart episode, a couple of episodes back.

But at one of the lunches during the conference I met Karla Boza, a third generation coffee farmer in El Salvador. And the way that she spoke about the coffee prices was in a way that nobody else was at this conference because it affected her everyday life. She was one of the handful of coffee farmers at this conference talking about coffee prices. Don't you think that maybe more of the players affected by the crisis should have been in that room talking about this crisis?

In this conversation that I recorded with Karla, which you'll hear in a moment, we talk about the flaws in coffee buying. We often applaud coffee roasters, the folks that are on the other end of the supply stream for being transparent with their prices, but are the prices that they're paying actually changing the lives of farmers? Mostly no. Being transparent doesn't make a price fair and oftentimes the business of paying a higher price comes with a demand from a coffee farmer to do something extra for their coffee to stand out or taste different, which ends up costing the producer even more money.

In this episode, I urge you to rethink the way that you consider quality, not just in coffee but in every realm. Karla's experiences with coffee buyers ranging from being tricked by an importer who told them that their coffee was shit to another noting that it was a standout from the samples that they were sent, question where quality really comes from and if we should be basing our price standards on arbitrary markers of quality.

This is easily one of the most informative and remarkable conversations I've ever had, and I promise we'll be hearing more from Karla in the near future. Before we begin, I should note that the term coffee stream comes from Keba Konte, owner of Red Bay Coffee in Oakland, California, who used this term during his talk at Re:co, which is the event that Karla and I met at. Without further ado, let's listen to our conversation with Karla Boza.