Felicitas Pantoja: Building peace, one coffee cup at a time
Felicitas Pantoja, chief executive officer of Coffee for Peace, looks back to her early days in peacebuilding work in the communities of Cotabato and Basilan for the spark that ignited what would become a highly successful social enterprise in the country.
Pantoja, fondly called Joji, was accompanying her husband, a missionary of the Mennonite Church Canada, in community meetings to help settle disputes and help define in concrete terms the concept of peace.
She recalled observing that in meetings held in the “peace houses” that they built, coffee helped bring dispute parties together for dialogues.
“And the conversations result in good outcomes,” Pantoja said. “As they come inside the huts, they leave behind their weapons. So, there is a good atmosphere for dialogue over cups of coffee.”
“So I told my husband that we should be serving the beverage every day if only to ensure that people can be brought together into one table and thresh out their differences, and achieve peace among themselves,” Pantoja said.
Thus began the phrase “coffee for peace,” which Pantoja said she quickly registered as a business name back in Davao City.
“I like the name because it says something. [The enterprise] can be a vehicle for people to continue talking so that they would achieve something for peace,” Pantoja explained.
As they were shaping the enterprise in 2008, Pantoja said they thought of what other advocacies it had to take on.
With a cursory look at the domestic coffee landscape, Pantoja noted that producers of beans had not quite improved their economic lot by mainly supplying for a multinational company in the last hundred years.
“We thought this is where we can make a difference, so it has become our mission,” she said.
This is why Coffee for Peace set out to provide fair and equal opportunity for people involved in the coffee value chain, hence the tag, “just coffee.”
Environmental protection
The enterprise is also an ardent voice for environmental protection, especially the forest ecosystem, hence its promotion of sustainable farming in the cultivation of coffee. Pantoja said that cultivation of the crop has an environmental upside as a coffee tree has a 6-meter deep root system that can hold the soil and help preserve the water source.
The situation of the country’s coffee industry provided a rosy prospect for Pantoja’s enterprise model. The Philippines has been a net importer of coffee while at the same time there are export opportunities like in Canada.
She recalled how a potential client in Canada demanded 50 metric tons a month of coffee grown among the communities on Mt. Matutum in Sarangani province. But she could only muster two tons.
Mindful of the need to consolidate and improve the country’s coffee industry, Coffee for Peace set out to help train communities in coffee cultivation and processing, ensuring they meet the stringent standards required to produce quality beans.
In its shop, Coffee for Peace sells only coffee grown locally, such as in the mountains of Sagada, Matutum, and Apo.
Pantoja served as business coach to many SMEs engaged in coffee, and is currently chair of the coffee council of the Davao Region.
Reward for a bold dream
From its humble beginnings, Coffee for Peace has earned accolades for its bold dream.
In 2015, it received an N-Peace Award from the United Nations Development Program–Impact Investment Exchange Asia, which cited how “coffee farming is helping indigenous peoples in the Philippines to protect the environment, preserve their ancestral lands and secure their financial future.”
It was the national winner of the Asean Business Awards 2017 for inclusive business; the Asean Private Sector Leadership awardee on Rural Development and Poverty Eradication in 2017; the recipient of the 2018 Asean Business Award for SME Excellence in Corporate Social Responsibility; and The Best Social Enterprise in the 2019 Sustainable Business Awards Philippines.
And in 2020, it garnered the Business for Peace Award, considered the “Nobel Prize for business,” given by the Business for Peace Foundation.
