San Vicente Cooperative Admits Fifteen New Farms After Contentious Vote

The San Vicente Regional Cooperative's general assembly voted 127 to 94 on Tuesday evening to admit fifteen smallholder farms into the membership, expanding the cooperative's roll to 412 working members. The vote followed three hours of debate over whether the new members should pay full dues immediately or be granted a two-year grace period while their yields stabilized. The council ultimately approved a compromise: new members pay half-dues for the first season, then the full rate.

The closeness of the vote has exposed a rift between the cooperative's older members, who argue that discounted dues undermine the mutual-aid fund that sustains all farmers through price volatility, and younger farmers and those newly admitted who say that full dues in a first season can force a family farm into debt before it has earned its first harvest. The tension mirrors a broader question facing Tierra Verde's cooperative movement as it grows: how to balance expansion with the financial discipline that has kept these networks solvent for three decades.

Miguel Flores, the cooperative's elected treasurer, said on Wednesday that the council would spend the coming weeks developing a formal policy on dues scaling. The coffee harvest is expected to begin in late October, and many of the newly admitted farms are counting on their first cooperative-channel sales to cover the cost of harvest labour and equipment. The federal office in Meridian that oversees cooperative registration has yet to formally approve the expansion, a process that typically takes six to eight weeks.