Starbucks Changing The
Way Costa Rican Farmers
Grow Coffee — and
Live
By Manuel Valdes
In 1993, a
representative from a
U.S. company called
Starbucks visited
Rodrigo Vargas' coffee
farms in the highlands
of central Costa Rica.
Vargas remembers
chatting with her,
giving her a tour of his
coffee fields that
covered the green
hillsides in a
checkerboard pattern and
the mills that churned
out millions of pounds
of dried coffee a year.
She took samples and
said goodbye.
"I had never heard of
[Starbucks] before in my
life," Vargas recalls as
he smokes a cigar and
drinks a cup of coffee.
He had just given a
speech about the future
of coffee in Costa Rica
at an international
conference in the
country's capital of San
José, about 15 miles
south of his farm.
Vargas is one of the
hundreds of farmers —
large and small — in
Costa Rica who have
benefited from
Starbucks' arrival after
an influx of cheap beans
from Brazil and Vietnam
saturated the market and
sent prices tumbling in
the late 1990s, creating
a crisis for coffee
growers.
As Starbucks' presence
grew in Costa Rica,
Vargas' relationship
with the Seattle
specialty coffee-shop
chain tightened. He
replaced 25 percent of
his coffee plants with
better breeds of arabica
beans to keep up with
Starbucks' growing
demand and quality
standards.
By 1998, he sold 1.2
million pounds of coffee
to Starbucks. In 2002,
Vargas visited Seattle,
met CEO Howard Schultz
and sat courtside at a
then-Schultz-owned
Seattle Sonics
basketball game.
This year, Vargas will
sell 70 percent of the
more than 7 million
pounds of beans
harvested on his farms
to the company.
"Starbucks saved the
coffee industry in Costa
Rica," Vargas says. |
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