Brazilian Women Seize Their Coffee Narrative
Josiane Cotrim, left, IWCA’s advisor, center, Kellem Emanuele, president of IWCA Global and Helena Maria Ramos Alves, Embrapa Café.
By Kelly Stein
Many misconceptions underlie the image of Brazil, a global coffee giant with record harvests. Persistent tales of poor-quality coffee suited only for blends and criticism of the country’s fully mechanized harvests discourage professionals diligently introducing the world to new ways of thinking about the cultivation and sensory bounty of Brazil’s 14 different coffee producing regions.
Musing about what is unconventional leaves no room to talk about sensorial quality, unique lots and innovations. When it comes to gender and race gap within the coffee industry, few mention the subject. For this reason, several women in coffee decided to take pen in hand and document the many contributions made by women.
One report, in particular, drew their ire, The Coffee Exporter’s Guide, Third Edition, published in 2012 by the International Trade Centre, stated on pg. 61 that “(…) women do little of the field and harvest work in Brazil.”
If you consider only official documents, (contracts, receipts) women didn’t exist. This lack of information inspired women in coffee to start writing a book about their realities. According to Helena Maria Ramos Alves, Embrapa Café’s researcher, there was no budget for the first publication dedicated to women in coffee in Brazil. Recording the contributions of these professionals and raising the visibility of women was possible thanks to a partnership with the International Women’s Coffee Alliance (IWCA) of Brazil and Embrapa Café.
Brazilian Women Seize Their Coffee Narrative
Giving voice and showing the faces of these women in different and remote parts of Brazil was the first step.
“First, we launched an e-book in Portuguese at International Coffee Week in Belo Horizonte in 2017,” says Alves. For Embrapa researcher Cristina Arzabe, the main challenge was bringing together several institutions with more than 40 writers with different professional backgrounds to cover different producing regions.
“Creating a project with no funding in a collective work was thought-provoking, but the result is really diverse and full of details from different corners of Brazil. It is definitely a work made by a rich networking,” says Arzabe. IWCA Brazil started the project almost three years ago with Embrapa Café collecting data and soliciting financial support, time, and expertise from organizations including MAPA, Itaipu, and UN Women.
Once published, the world learned more about how these women toiled in the field to keep Brazil’s coffee industry breaking harvest records.
“UN Women helped us to translate the content and another e-book was launched at the International Coffee Organization meeting in 2018, in London. Now, we celebrate a printed bilingual book that was launched at the United Nations in New York, in March at the We Empower and Win-Win Forum event,” says Alves.
The effort has inspired women in Brazil and outside the country to organize themselves and improve their technical skills by attending coffee events. “We remain really motivated. We already started the second edition with stories from producing regions that we couldn’t cover in the first version,” says Josiane Cotrim who is the project’s pioneer. As an IWCA advisor, she is eager to see more people collecting stories and data. She guarantees that women in coffee in Brazil has just begun!
Learn more: embrapa.br