Bird Friendly® Workshop for Organic Inspectors in Chiapas, Mexico

On May 17 and 18 (2010), SMBC staff traveled to southwest Chiapas, one of Mexico's important coffee-producing states, to conduct a training workshop for organic inspectors. The two-day event was organized by the local office of Control Union (CU), an inspection agency SMBC has worked with before in both Peru and Indonesia.

Robert Rice of SMBC and Lázaro Escalante of CU Mexico brought a dozen people together in the town of Jaltenango, a coffee center south of Tuxtla-Gutierrez nestled near the protected natural area known as El Triunfo Biosphere Reserve. The reserve covers some 120,000 hectares and is home to nearly 400 species of birds. Small-holder coffee farms with a diverse shade cover blanket much of the area contiguous with El Triunfo.

The workshop focused on training the CU inspectors in evaluating shade conditions in organic coffee farms, using the Bird Friendly (BF) criteria as standards for what constitutes shade-grown coffee that can support a diverse avifauna. The goal was to have inspectors ready to respond to recent requests by producer groups and exporters such as AMSA (one of Mexico's largest exporters of coffee) for a BF certification.

With one day "in class" and the other in the field, workshop participants got to understand the importance of having strict criteria like those of the BF program that define bird habitat within the coffee agroforestry system. The field practicum, carried out in an area of small landholders who manage shade coffee, involved a practice inspection. Participants found more than 20 species of shade trees in this short exercise.

Tree List

in this region where more than 80 species are used in coffee

Also in attendance were four staff members of the "despacho" DESPAMA, a technical assistance organization based in Tapachula. Despachos are private firms that have recently appeared on the coffee scene in Mexico to aid grower groups with "internal control" (knowing what all cooperative members have in terms of coffee area, maintenance practices, etc.) and general technical assistance with the various certification schemes now popular across the coffee landscape. DESPAMA works with some 40 different grower associations and is confident that many of its clients will seek and qualify for the BF seal of quality shade-grown coffee.

Workshop Participants