Visual promotion material for agroforestry systems

Coffee is the most important raw material traded throughout the world. But the global coffee production is threatened by the climate crisis: Weather extremes and increasing pests and diseases are making harvests less and less predictable.

Coffee originates from the subtropical forest eco-systems of the Ethiopian highlands, where it grows under the shade of a variety of trees. Naturland’s concept of agroforestry systems is based on this, but adapted for modern production requirements and for specific local eco-systems.

Growing coffee in agroforestry systems has many benefits for the farmers such as high quality coffee, better biodiversity, soil health & natural pest control, carbon sequestration & reduced carbon footprint as well as shade trees, which provide wood and supplementary crops, which reduces the farmers’ dependency.

The example of Hakizimana Melancecan, an organic coffee farmer from Gitega, Burundi, and his coffee co-operative federation COCOCA (see video below) shows just how amazing a farm using such practices can look. Naturland has been assisting the Burundian coffee co-operative since 2014 in converting to agroforestry-based organic coffee production.

Even when it was quite a challenge to manage the three different production countries (Burundi, Tanzania and Rwanda) at the same time the Fairpicture team around Fabrice and especially Loïc managed to achieve all objectives.

The most important common goal was to finalise the promotional video by the end of June to present it at Naturland's Organic Coffee Summit, while the photos were already being used for communication on the client's website and newsletter.

Besides, the client received additional subtitles to present the video also in German as well as some of the raw video-footage in order to work with the material afterwards on their own.