Common Ground: Delicious Peace

Mirembe Kawomera co-op members sort green coffee beans — a critical element in coffee quality, since one bad bean, when ground at home, can ruin an entire pot of coffee.
Photo by Curt Fissel

March 2007

Delicious Peace

The Ugandan coffee rooted in Muslim, Jewish and Christian cooperation, and the American who discovered it

By Gregory Dicum

Paul Katzeff remembers the call he received back in 2005 like it was yesterday. A young woman who was just back from working as an aid worker in Uganda had called Katzeff, owner of Thanksgiving Coffee Company in Fort Bragg, California, out of the blue. “She asked me a simple question,” he recalls, ‘Would you buy five sacks of Ugandan coffee?’ I rolled my eyes and thought, ‘Oh no, another Peace Corps worker who made some promises that she should not have made.’ I could hear the desperation in her voice.”

Katzeff had been in the business for more than 30 years and, while his company, which specializes in gourmet Fair Trade and organic coffee, prides itself on putting people first, he knew that his customers demand quality—nobody in the business just buys coffee from random callers, especially not without a sample. Indeed, 39 other coffee companies had already rejected the young woman. But something kept Katzeff from hanging up.

“I guess I was in a decent mood that morning,” he says, “so I said to her, ‘Tell me more about this coffee.’”

And this is what he learned:

In 2004, JJ Keki, a coffee farmer living in the highlands around Imbale, Uganda, had an idea. Growing coffee is tough work, and prices are chronically low for farmers. It’s not uncommon for farmers to earn less than a nickel for the coffee in a three-dollar latte. Accounting for over $80 billion a year, coffee is one of the most valuable trading commodities in the world. And competition is fierce: Some 20 million people worldwide earn their living from coffee, making it one of the most important sources of income for much of the tropics.

Keki knew that when farmers come together in cooperatives, they can often get a better deal, especially if they trade through the Fair Trade system, in which buyers adhere to an internationally established set of standards. By guaranteeing growers fair prices, working only with democratically run cooperatives, and making advance credit available, coffee companies earn the right to use the familiar black-and-white Fair Trade Certified label on their coffee.

But in Uganda there was an added wrinkle: People in the area where Keki lives are mostly Christian and Muslim, with a sizeable Jewish minority. Keki saw a co-op as a way to bring these communities together to solve problems that all of them shared.

“I asked my fellow neighbors, the Christians and the Muslims, would they form this co-op?” Keki recalls. “And they agreed.” In 2004, several hundred Muslim, Christian and Jewish farmers founded the Mirembe Kawomera cooperative. The name means “delicious peace” in the Luganda language.

When Katzeff had absorbed this story, he was floored. “This was the most incredible thing to happen to me in a long time,” he remembers. “Thirty-nine of my peers had to turn down this young woman’s offer in order for her to get to me. And the reason that they did is that they were focused on the product, not on the people.”

“I’ll tell you what,” he told her. “If you promise not to make one more phone call, I’ll buy it all.”

Katzeff is known in the coffee industry for helping small farmers around the world improve the quality of their beans. So his decision wasn’t totally reckless: Even though he hadn’t tasted Mirembe Kawomera coffee, he was hopeful he could do something with it. A few weeks after the phone call, he went to Uganda to see what he had gotten himself into.

“When I cupped the coffee in Uganda,” he says, “wouldn’t you know it? It was fantastic!” Katzeff quickly made a deal with the co-op, buying the entire year’s crop at prices above the going rate for organic, Fair Trade beans, and committing to a profit-sharing arrangement for the next three years.

For their part, the community was ecstatic. “We are very happy,” says Keki, “because in addition to the peace, we are also enjoying the proceeds that we are getting from our coffee products. And so when everybody is happy, we can spread the gospel of peace.”

During his visits, Katzeff marvels at the tranquility of the community. “You don’t get a sense that there’s something spectacular going on,” he says. “You just get a feeling that you’re in a community that’s safe. Everybody says hello to everybody, and you cannot tell a Jew from a Christian from a Muslim by looking at them. But the people have on their homes a Star of David or a crescent or a cross. And they’re doing it with love and tolerance—it’s sweet.”

Katzeff was inspired by the work of Mirembe Kawomera and quickly dedicated himself to making sure the co-op’s efforts bear fruit. “They need to sell five containers of coffee at Fair Trade prices every year for this to become sustainable,” he says. “Our job is to build this project so they can do that. Then not only do they have a good idea, but their idea makes their community sustainable, and that’s really when this project will be successful.”

In order to reach Mirembe Kawomera’s goal of selling 375,000 pounds of coffee a year, Katzeff is turning to America’s faith communities. He says he’s been meeting with mosques, synagogues and churches to find new ways to sell coffee. In the process, he’s spreading the word of Delicious Peace: This winter, the San Francisco Interfaith Council began a program to help its members serve Mirembe Kawomera coffee at their gatherings.

“This is a coffee that should be famous for what it represents,” Katzeff says. “It represents religious tolerance and cooperation and people deciding to increase the size of the pie by collaborating with each other instead of fighting each other. It’s a wonderful story that the world needs to hear: in a tiny little spot, in deepest, darkest Africa, in Africa’s darkest moment, it is perhaps the only cooperative in the world that has Jews, Christians and Muslims working together.”

Mirembe Kawomera has now grown to 570 farmer-members, and Keki says that if his community can work together like this, anyone can. “I always tell everyone who drinks our coffee that they shouldn’t only enjoy the deliciousness of our coffee,” he says, “but they should also become ambassadors of peace to the whole world.”

Gregory Dicum is the co-author of The Coffee Book: Anatomy of an Industry from Crop to the Last Drop (The New Press, 2006). He lives in San Francisco, where he’s written for the New York Times, Harper’s, Mother Jones and others.

Recommend this page to a friend

Top Ten pages recommended to friends: