Building long-term resilience for the Nicaraguan coffee industry

Twin’s ‘Double Espresso’ project, funded by the Big Lottery Fund, takes on some of the biggest challenges facing Nicaraguan coffee smallholders.

In the first half of 2012 Twin was successful in winning Big Lottery Fund (BLF) support for a new coffee project in Nicaragua. The ‘Double Espresso’ project will benefit some 10,000-plus households across 10 producer organisations in the Cafénica network.

Working with smallholder coffee farmers to take on the biggest threats to their livelihoods, the project will help them to gain the skills and knowledge they need to adapt to imminent climate change. The project will also provide training in price risk management, which is vital for protecting smallholder incomes in a volatile market.

Coffee produced by participating smallholders in Nicaragua will be marketed at a premium based on its climate change and environmental credentials, putting environmental concerns at the heart of coffee buying.

Background

Twin has been working with Cafénica, an association of smallholder coffee producer organisations in Nicaragua, for over five years. Climate change and the threat it poses to coffee production and farmer livelihoods has emerged as a critical challenge in our work with Cafénica, especially in the last three years.

While many farmers recognise the need to adapt for climate change, they often lack basic knowledge about appropriate practices and technology or are unable to access finance to support the necessary investments in adaptation.

Independent research carried out by CATIE and CIAT forecasts significant threats to the livelihoods of coffee producers in Nicaragua- underlining the need for farmers to adapt, migrate or diversify. The Double Espresso project will focus on the first of these strategies, working across the length of the smallholder coffee value chain to support smallholders to adapt for climate change.

Twin’s work

Twin’s Double Espresso project will enable coffee farmers and their households to adapt to climate change and increased volatility in the coffee market. We aim to build smallholder capacity through interventions at three levels:

1. At farm level: enabling smallholders to develop more resilient production systems and manage natural resources more sustainably through Climate Change Field Schools, technical training and demonstration sites.
2. At producer organisation level: building capacity to manage volatile markets affected by increasingly unpredictable supply. Price risk management and financial planning workshops will enable organisations to analyse market risk and develop more robust seasonal market strategies.
3. At a national level: The project will seek to influence the whole coffee sector in Nicaragua and push key actors such as government, financial institutions and coffee buyers to create sustainable funding mechanisms and supportive policies that enable smallholders to adapt to climate change.

Next steps

The project commences with an inaugural meeting of the Climate Change Reference Group, bringing together researchers and agricultural extension specialists in order to bridge the current gaps between research and farm practice; and community-based adaptation planning workshops using participatory methodologies to identify priority climate risks in target communities and develop awareness campaigns and adaptation projects in response to these.

This far-reaching project aims to influence the entire Nicaraguan coffee sector – demonstrating and implementing much-needed climate and risk management practices.