Jenipher Sambazi, a coffee farmer in Uganda, travelled to Wales for Fairtrade Fortnight 2025, where she met with Welsh farmer Teleri Fielden to discuss common challenges they both face within the mountain farming sector.
Sambazi, who is the face of the Welsh Fairtrade coffee brand ‘Jenipher’s Coffi’, highlighted climate change as a problem she is faced with on a daily basis.
Fielden, who also works as a policy officer for the Farmers’ Union of Wales, reflected: “As two farmers from mountainous areas, despite producing very different products, we face many common challenges – and there’s a lot that we can learn from one another.
“Unpredictable incomes and changing weather, including new and more severe threats of pests, are shared challenges for farmers from Wales to Uganda.”
Biodiversity
Fielden and her husband Ned are tenant farmers producing “Biodiversity Beef and Lamb” from their stock of native cattle and sheep, which graze diverse pastures and landscapes to conserve and strengthen local biodiversity in the mountainous region of Snowdonia in north Wales.
In the Mbale region of Uganda, there is estimated 3,000 fairtrade and organic farmers that use techniques such as agroforestry to grow specialty coffee in the Mt. Elgon Agroforestry Communities Co-operative Enterprise (MEACCE), which Sambazi is a vice chair of.
As part of agroforestry, tree planting can reportedly provide a multitude of benefits for Ugandan coffee farmers, “including anchoring the soil, which, with increasingly heavy rains, gets washed away with crops, homes and, also, human lives.”
Fairtrade
One of the co-founders for Jenipher’s Coffi, Ffion Storer Jones noted: “Farming faces enormous pressures globally, but by standing together and acting boldly to support farmers, we can build a fairer future.”
Emma Jones, one of the facilitators of Wales’ Climate Farm Demo Project, also attended the meeting with Sambazi and Fielden.
She said: “It was very interesting, and devastating, to learn from Jenipher about how vulnerable farmers in Uganda are to climate change.
“It highlighted how important it is to support farmers in the face of an increasingly hostile climate to adapt sustainable practices to ensure food security for all.”
