A woman named Joji Pantoja, from the Philippines visited the Town of Altona as part of her cross-Canada tour.

She and her husband have lived in Mindanao in the Philippines since 2006, and work as peace missionaries with Mennonite Church Canada. This island has conflict relating to poverty, violence, and land ownership.

"We were working and listening to the communities for why they are uprising. Why are they rebelling, what's the cause?"

Pantoja explained she didn't understand the conflict at first because she's originally from Luzon, another island in the Philippines.

"Luzon is very progressive, very organized... and here comes the Mindanao area, who seems to be like in the 1950's, and people are not progressing. There are not enough school systems, there are not enough medical facilities," Pantoja said.

She talked to people who were being displaced as refugees in their homeland.

"As we listened to them, and put two conflicting parties together, we served coffee, and I noticed, I observed, if there's coffee served, there's dialogue... maybe I could use this as an iconic product for peace."

On her search for coffee, she reached out to workers in the mountain areas where the beans are grown. This area has its own conflict.

"Their people are also being displaced in a sense that when they help the rebels, then the military would think that they are part of the rebels. And then when the rebels saw them helping the military, they would be thought of as part of the military. But they are just people in the middle, and they are just trying to live."

Coffee farming is helping people in the Philippines secure a financial future

She asked the workers if they'd be interested in having their coffee marketed. At first, the coffee growers were opposed to the idea of having another project to take on. However, Pantoja eventually found some interested farmers.

"We started with 20, now I am training 600 farmers," said Pantoja.

Pantoja teaches people to process the coffee at a consistent quality. In Canada, the coffee was graded as high quality to speciality quality, which Pantoja was surprised to hear.

Her hope was for families to have another way of succeeding economically, without having to take part in the conflict.

Pantoja said she wants to grow the business slowly, and teach people how to produce the coffee properly, in a "peace and reconciliation community."

Some of the families were only earning $85 per month for a household, but now some earn $420 by selling beans and roasting coffee.

"We needed a good roasting machine that would scale up the production, because if we have that we could package each coffee of these communities... according to their tribal group, and sell it to our grocery stores all throughout the Philippines."

Pantoja said this added income would allow families to get better hospital care, education, food and homes.

In order to do that they need industrial scale roasters which can cost up to $10,000. If you are interested in supporting the cause, you can learn more by clicking here.