This episode is part of a subseries where I’ve partnered with my comrade Giulio Quarta from the Crypto Commons Association and their initiative called the Commons Economy Roadmap (CER) where we will be interviewing some of the projects listed as part of the CER. In this interview we spoke to Neri Ortiz and Lucía Ruiz who both live in Mexico. Neri is a coffee farmer and Lucia works at the financial cooperative that services his community. They’ve both been working together with EthicHub, a project that has been providing loans to coffee farmers in Latin America at much better rates than you would otherwise get locally thanks to crypto.
During the discussion we talk about the economic situation of coffee farmers in Mexico and the exploitative loan agreements they are often forced into, how EthicHub has helped their situation, and what they’ve learned so far.
You can find a transcription of the interview on the CER website here.
The CER is a knowledge base and promotion protocol to highlight and empower what we consider to be among the most relevant 20 projects in the current economic juncture: companies and ecosystems that are building open infrastructures to regenerate society, to support the struggle of citizens, farmers, activists, scientists, tech experts and entrepreneurs on the ground at the dawn of global collapse.
The Crypto Commons Association is also a project within Breadchain, an organization I co-founded for building blockchain apps from a left-wing political POV.
