The Central de Cooperativas Agrarias Cafetaleras de los Valles de Sandia: CECOVASA, or La Central, was founded in 1970 by five cooperatives that came together to export directly, to obtain better prices and to share expenses; now it has 8 cooperatives that bring together 4,581 producers. The Central exports more than 75% of the coffee production of the Tambopata and Inambari valleys, on the eastern slope of the Andes in southern Peru. The production of both valleys represents 2% of the national total.

The members of Cecovasa are Quechuas and Aymaras, they come from the highlands of Lake Titicaca. This region of infertile soils is periodically affected by the El Niño phenomenon, which was and is the cause of migrations (such as the one that occurred in the 1930s in the Bolivian Yungas region, where they learned to cultivate coffee that, twenty years later, later, gave rise to the Central). Thus, the coffee, which was born in Ethiopia, and was spread from France and Holland, came to Cecovasa from Bolivia).

The Aymara civilization colonized the Tambopata valley for the most part; the Quechua civilization, meanwhile, the Inambari. The producers cultivate an average of two hectares of coffee plantations. Cecovasa’s production area ranges from 800 to 2,000 meters above sea level and a third of the coffee plantations are in the buffer zone of the Bahuaja Sonene National Park. The harvest is concentrated between March and July, extending in the highest parts until November.
CECOVASA’s purpose is to promote association, leadership and business excellence of its cooperatives and associated producers. To this end, it promotes business training and provides training services, technical assistance, credit, acquisition of supplies, brand development, certification, information, collection, processing and marketing of specialty coffees. With all this, it seeks to contribute to the increase in income and the improvement of the conditions and quality of life of families.”
VISION
“CECOVASA is an organization of coffee growers and producers from the Sandia Valley supported by the values ​​and principles of cooperativism, committed to the eradication of extreme poverty, the preservation of Andean culture and environmental sustainability, which supports its consolidation and business growth in the efficiency of its production and commercial processes and in the originality and quality of its products”.