84.6

Overview

My name is Felipe Sacaca Diaz. I’m from Tipiplaya county. For more than 25 years I have made a living cultivating coffee. When I arrived from the Altiplano, at first, nobody knew how to cultivate coffee. We just took the little seedlings that our comrades had to cultivate coffee in our lots. In those days, coffee cost a lot, but we sold our product to intermediaries, and they paid us right then and there. We didn’t have any technical assistance. Then the project Agro-Yungas got here, and we learned a few techniques to improve our coffee plantations. In 2008, I heard on the radio that they were talking about the Cup of Excellence. They said that there had been specialty coffee winners from other colonies, and I thought “why can’t I participate in the competition.” But I didn’t know how to manage specialty coffee and what the requirements were. I always asked my organization ASOCAFE what the competition was and my comrades didn’t know about the Cup of Excellence either. But I started to track down the technicians from FECAFEB and they gave me information about the competition. They came by to talk to us in the colony about how we should prepare specialty coffees for the competition. Some of my comrades and I decided to get going a bit to prepare specialty coffees, like the technicians from FECAFEB showed us. We started to harvest coffee cherries, to do the fermentation right, wash with enough clean water, dry on the tables and store our coffee only in the collection centers. So, following these recommendations, we participated in the competition last year, 2008, and my comrade David Yanaguaya and I won 27th place. This year we won the same place again. Now we’ve learned something about how you should manage specialty coffee. Now we’re going to add more coffee plantations and improve them from the start. I mean from the seed, fertilize our plantings with help from the technicians to sell my product with a high quality to the buyers from other countries. Now what we want is for this type of event to continue, so that my coffee can be recognized on a worldwide level. That way we can keep producing specialty coffees in years to come. Lastly, I would like to thank all of the comrades who made this event possible, like FECAFEB, which is, for me, like a school. And I want to encourage my comrades to keep increasing the production of coffee. My coffee lots are at about 1720 meters and the lot number is 26. I’m a member of ASOCAFE.