Our office consists of rough-around-the-edges revolutionaries – scattered between Bangalore and BR Hills, India. Morning coffee is a Pour Over brewed with beans from leftovers – samples of new coffees we are trying out. By the afternoon our bloom is more precise. The bakery next door makes the best eggs puffs ever so those are consumed as part of our refined coffee pairing experiments. In the early evenings as rain beats down on rain, a chart paper is fashioned on to the tabletop. Mind maps are drawn, redrawn and reviewed. Where are we going and how can we get there in the most democratic way?
The idea of Black Baza Coffee did not come from us at all. It came from coffee growers themselves and it was the idea of creating a local, participatory and meaningful movement for coffee – starting with India and hopefully elsewhere as well. The idea of Black Baza Coffee holds within it a want for an alternative – a production and market system which values producers and nature equally.
For those amidst us, a four-year research project led to the realisation that coffee markets are structured in ways that undermine the wellbeing of farmers and forests. This is true even for contemporary sustainability mechanisms – which are, on paper, designed to tackle social and environmental inequities, but in reality achieve little. The uneven power structure of coffee value chains and the inherent limitations of existing sustainability mechanisms is what emboldened us to create Black Baza Coffee, a movement that attempts to reconstruct marketplaces such that coffee as a commodity is re-embedded in place, people and ecology.
Quite simply, our work is two-staged – first we co-imagine a sustainable future with coffee growing communities and then we interconnect producers to consumers through telling stories on a community-supported agriculture marketplace.
This means that Black Baza Coffee is not solely a trading organisation but an enabling one.
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