Food 4 Farmers
Current donation: $80,000
Donations to date: $295,000
Food 4 Farmers (F4F) partners with coffee-farming families in Latin America to increase food security. Our donation will allow F4F to teach climate-smart practices to these families, strengthen local food systems, improve incomes, reduce deforestation, restore local ecosystems, and create a healthier planet.
Why They're Climate Smart
F4F understands that many small-scale coffee-farming families in Latin America — along with millions of others — live below the global poverty line on less than $2.15 per person, per day. This is largely due to their dependence on a single commodity crop and a lack of local opportunities to improve their livelihoods.
Through their home garden program, F4F teaches sustainable farming practices, including the making of organic compost and pesticides, growing a diverse range of organic food crops, improving soil health, using agroforestry to restore biodiversity, and building low-cost water management systems to sustain gardens through dry seasons. Then, to help diversify the farmers' incomes, F4F helps them establish supplemental on-farm businesses like farmers markets and beekeeping — which has the added benefit of reforesting land to provide pollinators with food and shelter. And to ensure long-term sustainability, their community promotor programs train and empower young women and men to bring these climate-smart techniques to more families and support their progress.
Why They Receive Our Continued Support
Industrial agriculture is responsible for about 80 percent of all tropical deforestation globally. F4F aims to disrupt this trend by helping small-scale farmers transform their monoculture farms into sustainable operations that provide food and income security without the need for increased acreage. Our donation will allow F4F to expand farm diversification at their partner COMEPCAFE in Colombia, add over 1,000 families to their program (via a new cooperative, Manos Campesinas in Guatemala), plant over 5,000 trees, and continue to teach water conservation methods and engage women and young people to lead their communities to healthier diets, stronger local economies, and climate-smart farming practices.