Across the coffee-growing countries of Latin America, an itinerant, rarely acknowledged workforce chases the harvest from farm to farm. Many of them are refugees displaced by calamities such as the civil war in Colombia or the economic crisis in Venezuela. Their job is to pick coffee in exchange for food, shelter, and piece wages (e.g. cash per kilogram harvested). Droves of these pickers are leaving the region altogether, seeking more stable and remunerative employment in the U.S. This compounds the challenges faced by smallholder farmers, leaving them without access to skilled labor at critical moments of their harvest. Furthermore, these critical moments have become harder to plan for in the face of a changing climate. At best, their quality suffers; at worst, they lose their crop.

In 2017, Azahar created the “Pickers Project” with the threefold goal of ending worker exploitation in coffee, solving farmers’ labor issues, and improving quality. Its Colombian foundation, Manos al Grano, now trains a team of fulltime pickers, which it deploys to its partner farmers. It pays them salaries with the same benefits its employees are entitled to, something virtually unheard of in the world of picking coffee.¹