Empowering coffee producers to restore land

Location

Amazonas and Cajamarca regions, Peru

About the project:

The Café Selva Norte Perú project is located in the Amazonas and Cajamarca regions in north of Peru, with a total potential area of thousands of hectares. The project area includes a set of dispersed coffee producers’ properties in the mountainous region know and “selva alta” where coffee is mainly produced (between 1200 and 1800 meters above sea level). The project area is located in one of Peru’s three main coffee production zones and is recognized for the quality of its production.

The producers are part of a vicious circle including continuous soil degradation, the advance of the agricultural frontier and the reduction of their quality of life. The cooperative is an important tool to break this vicious circle, but they are still fragile. 

Many factors have contributed to the deforestation of the Andean watersheds. Poor forest and agricultural management techniques, burning practices for weed control, illegal logging and mining have all contributed to the loss of forest cover, erosion of the soil and, in turn, to a loss of income for local producers. 

The continuation of such practices will clearly prevent the development of a sustainable economy in these communities.

Methods are available to remedy the situation but are often out of reach of the local farmers and cooperatives due to limited availability of adapted credit, capacities or technical know-how.

Urapi Sustainable Land Use’s unique business model empowers communities of small farmers to become actors of change to stop land degradation and to mitigate climate change.

Using a bottom-up approach, ECOTIERRA is working directly with cooperatives to aggregate the efforts of hundreds of small farmers through a holistic approach built on three components:

1. Land use transition to:
   • Recover degraded lands, often pastures, with productive agroforestry systems,
   • Rehabilitate old fragile agroforestry system increasing their productive lifespan and therefore avoiding deforestation risk,
   • Protect remaining forest and stop slash-and-burn practices to avoid deforestation
   • Reforest with a mix of timber species for future sustainable timber extraction
2. Value chain consolidation by:
   • Building infrastructure to strengthen coops' production capacities and positioning,
   • Developing marketing tools and positioning on special markets to help commercialize products with added value
3. Revenue diversification through VCS certified carbon projects to:
   • Generate new revenues based on payment for environmental services (reforestation & forest protection),
   • Generate a robust set of key performance indicators to strengthen sales and obtain added value.  

Investment type