Finca Dos Jefes covers about seven acres located in El Salto above the town of Boquete. The mission of the staff–-owners Rich Lipner and Dee Harris (the Dos Jefes in the name), production manager Amy Pescod, and foreman Lazaro Cedeño– is to produce coffee that is sustainable to both the coffee and the workers who produce it.  In addition to their sustainable and environmental practices, including naturally sun-drying the coffee cherries, Finca Dos Jefes plants and harvests according to the phases of the moon, which explains their marketing label: Café de la Luna. Evidence of this practice, called astrological agriculture, dates back thousands of years to the ancient peoples of the Nile and Euphrates River valleys (Wikipedia). Rich and Amy proudly offer guided coffee tours to augment farm income and provide guests with new insights into the world of coffee. 

If you walk or drive around Boquete (where Lindy and I live) and Volcan, you could easily get the impression that Panama is a massive producer of coffee. Not true. According to the World Atlas, in 2019 Panama ranked 37th of the world’s coffee exporters. Coffee production here is only about 0.1 % of world production. For a comparison, smaller Costa Rica is ranked 15th and produces almost exactly 15 times the Panamanian volume. Coffee is the second most traded commodity for developing countries, totaling about $15 billion annually, but is not even on the list of top ten Panamanian exports, well behind bananas and pineapples.  

In the 1990s, Panamanian coffee was largely unknown on the world market and sold mostly as commercial or “c-grade coffee” to be blended with coffees from other countries. The “C-price” is set primarily at the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX)–think Trading Places– according to supply and demand, not the cost of production. As more countries began to grow coffee, the supply expanded and the commodity price of coffee declined to below the cost of production. Growers began losing money. Some of the larger Panamanian growers recognized that something had to be done to keep the industry from collapse. They started exploring ways to upgrade the quality of Panama’s product through education and improved farming techniques, and ventured abroad to get help from international experts.  

During this time, a new idea of about coffee emerged worldwide as providers, such as Peet’s Coffee and Starbucks, and their customers began to demand more than just a cup of hot drink. They wanted a “coffee experience.” Flavor became more important and was added as a requirement to differentiate a higher quality coffee or “specialty coffee.” Coffee buyers, providers, and consumers became increasingly interested in a coffee’s “story,” e.g. what country, what farm, which processing methods, treatment of workers—the more details the better, often right down to the name of the person whose face is on the packaging. People at every level of the coffee cycle from buyers to consumers were willing to pay more for this better specialty coffee. 

Progressive Panamanian growers banded together and, in a sense of “cooperative competition” where everybody helped everybody, formed the Specialty Coffee Association of Panama (SCAP). Through their efforts, Panama was positioned to take advantage of the new coffee trends–the coffee scene was morphing into something akin to the wine industry with competitions and industry quality standards for tastings (“cuppings” in coffee parlance). The movie Higher Grounds on www.vimeo.com has more details and interviews with many of the Panamanian growers who led their country into the forefront of the world’s specialty coffee industry.  

Coffee farms in Panama (and worldwide) are small mostly small and owned by a single individual or family to produce c-grade coffee, thus are unable to take advantage of the higher specialty coffee prices. Most are subsistence farms, making barely enough to keep going. Subsistence farmers here cannot afford to process their own cherries, go organic, or join SCAP because they are too poor. They are forced by financial circumstances to sell their coffee as c-grade and accept the bare minimum return on their product, without the opportunity to taste, evaluate, and improve it. Small farmers also cannot afford to pay their workers a better wage (although Panama and Costa Rica pay scales are the highest in the region). Their situation is reminiscent of the larger Panamanian growers in the late 1990s and early 2000s who were selling their c-grade product at low or below production cost prices. The difference is that those growers had the resources to go out to find help to upgrade their coffee.  

The Panamanian comarca story is overwhelmingly one of poverty, The local Ngäbe and Buglé indigenous groups, near Boquete, Volcan, and Bocas del Toro are dependent on coffee production, both as growers and as farm workers.  Panamanian cherries need to be picked by hand and the Ngäbe-Bugle are the overwhelming majority of the pickers. The tribes are dependent upon coffee for their year round revenue. Most workers are unable to find work other than picking, consequently their total annual revenues are earned in the three to four months of the harvest. Comarca growers know their coffee but are small producers and/or subsistence farmers forced by economics to sell their coffee as c-grade and missing out on the higher prices for specialty coffee. 

Rich visited a comarca in 2007 and saw for himself the economic woes his workers and his fellow small coffee growers were experiencing. This trip evolved into Rich and Dee, along with like-minded friends, starting a financial assistance program to build a student-operated greenhouse, a small dormitory for long-distance students, and to supplement the students’ menu for the large comarca school.   

Now, Finca Dos Jefes is building on SCAP’s philosophies of cooperative competition and continuous learning to extend them one step further. Using the good will and trust built up with their own workers over the years, Amy and Lazaro met with comarca growers, workers, and families to begin a new conversation. They broached the idea that the growers could do more with their coffee than just sell the newly-picked coffee cherries for cash. They addressed why it could be more profitable for these growers to learn how to improve their farming techniques, increase the value of their crop, and move into the specialty coffee market. They offered to use Finca Dos Jefes as a conduit to world coffee markets where comarca coffee could be marketed as “single origin” coffee under labels that identify the comarca farms, just as the words “Dos Jefes” and “Rich Lipner” appear on the labels in Europe. Dos Jefes approached their European buyers for assistance. Those buyers were immediately intrigued with the story of comarca coffee. Samples were gathered and evaluated. One sample immediately met the qualifying score for the specialty label, which indicates that with more education and improved farming techniques, there could be more.  

Panama has changed the coffee growing model before. Indigenous-produced comarca coffee remains an untapped resource—both a physical resource of land and the human element. Developing them would have a massive impact on Panama itself. Panama has successful large farms—now it should harness the energy and potential of small farms and comarcas. 

Will this program started by Finca Dos Jefes expand and succeed? Well, that’s yet another story to be written.