Coffee Conversations: Ana Vizcaino on Battling Climate Change in Guatemala

Ana Vizcaino has been running Finca Esperanza in Guatemala since 2009, having inherited it from her father as a conventional coffee farm. She immediately worked to turn it organic, with all the ups and downs that such a project entailed.

Since then she has also started exporting, building a mill and forming Two Birds Coffee with her son Diego in 2014 to connect directly with roasters and navigate the treacherous coffee supply chain in a more equitable manner. As Two Birds grew and her other children joined the business, they began to expand to help other local farmers find a market in the United States as well as Canada and Saudi Arabia.

Like many coffee farms around the world, Finca Esperanza has been dealing with the impacts of climate breakdown. I spoke with Vizcaino about this two years ago, but I wanted to learn more about how things have progressed since then. It has been hard: Last year, Vizcaino posted on LinkedIn about the wildfires that ravaged her region of Guatemala, which then also had to deal with unseasonable rains.

There are other compounding issues all linked to climate change, from deforestation to the creeping growth of cities to the lack of workers. Vizcaino and I spoke in early December, and we talked about all this and more, including the impact of the coffee price surge over the past year.

This is another in an ongoing series of interviews with coffee industry stakeholders. You can find the others here. This interview has been lightly condensed and edited for clarity.