2006 Project
Los Frutos del Café is a registered charitable organization for the sustainable development of communities in coffee producing countries. Our purpose is to relieve poverty, encourage education, and preserve the native environment of these communities.
Our latest project aims at achieving all these purposes. PLANTING FOR A TOMORROW addresses issues on a social, educational, and environmental level.
This project provides children the tools and encouragement to educate themselves in the protection of their ecosystem and be primary force behind its conservation through sustainable development of their communities.
One of the major environmental challenges facing these rural communities is the deforestation of native forests. Tropical forests house the greatest amount of the world’s biodiversity. Forest clearance destroys habitat for tropical species and for the many migratory birds that breed in North America and winter in the tropics.
Forests play a significant role in carbon fixation. Removing Carbon dioxide from the atmosphere contributes to the reduction of Global warming. Also, standing forests are critical for the health of rivers and streams retaining water in a cycle that once broken is not easily restored.
Deforestation of the local forest in these communities is due to cash crops and the abuse of precious woods, which have their roots at the poverty level that many of these communities find themselves in.
Through this project we want to encourage children to become stewards of their land and involve them in proactive environment conservation. This project explores the role of coffee in the preservation of native forests. It is very important for this youth to know the flora and fauna of their region, the benefits of these native forests to coffee and timber, their role in the ecosystem and protection to other animals, the protection of water streams, caption of carbon dioxide and oxygen production.
Promoting sustainable agriculture in coffee growers, and reforestation with native tree species will give the community as a whole, a sense of responsibility for their own future.
Los Frutos del Café will donate the education materials and horticultural tools so students can grow seedlings of trees indigenous to the area in nurseries at their schools. In this process these children will put into practice all the environmental and agricultural education they have received in the past. They will experience first hand the responsibility they share in the preservation of their ecosystems and the world. These seedlings will become available for sale to the local coffee growers. Coffee growers will use these native trees to provide shade for their coffee plantations and at the same time reforest areas of the mountains that have been victim of deforestation, mud slides, etc…
The funds the students raise from the sale of their seedlings will go towards the needs of their school. This, our organization believes is the most important benefit of all; to give the children and the community the tools to be the biggest force behind their development.
