Cafe etico educational series: Coffee Seminar #2
The Workers Take Over the Means of Production
The Campesino Committee of the Highlands (CCDA) began as a movement of Mayan small farmers and rural workers. Following the 1996 Peace Accords that ended Guatemala’s 36-year civil war, the CCDA began to assist members to organize cooperatives on coffee plantations. The former plantation workers have applied skills learned over generations to produce a prize-winning specialty coffee that they call Café Justicia (Justice Coffee).
Today, the CCDA supports members to market their coffee and other value-added agricultural products, while continuing the broader struggle to re-found the Guatemalan state as a “plurinational, democratic and just State, based on the collective rights of the indigenous and campesino peoples.”
Seminar Host
Coffee Seminar #2 will be hosted by Steve Stewart, BC CASA-Café Justicia co-founder, and former CoDev staffer. Steve has worked with the CCDA since the early 1990s on human rights issues and the development of their Café Justicia program. He will speak on the CCDA’s unique dual-track strategy of attending to the immediate needs of its member cooperatives while fighting for structural transformation, and why workers’ control makes a better cup of coffee.
Date: Saturday, April 18
Time: 10:30 am to 12 noon (doors open at 10 am)
Location: Office of Cafe Etico / CoDevelopment Canada, 2747 East Hastings Street
(Please note the office is on the second floor and there is no elevator.)
Seating is limited / Pre-registration required