Life in Ursulo Galván gallups apace. I haven’t written for awhile because it has seemed as if I haven’t had any time to do it. I hope this finds you all well as we are.
We’ve lived here almost a year now, and the extraordinary has become a bit more ordinary. We hardly hear the dogs and roosters and waterfall and street vendors and music pouring out of open windows and buses lurching around our corner and the burros. We don’t think much about the fact that most of the time we hang our laundry out to dry or that we have Jero to do the dishes and a whole lot more.
We do still notice with surprise that we are drinking coffee from our own coffee beans. Jim has taken to roasting it on our stove every couple of days. It takes quite a lot of work for it to get to the point where he can roast it. All over the hillsides surrounding the Colonia and throughout the region whole families have been picking beans by hand. Some people pick coffee on their own terrenos, some on terrenos they rent, some pick on larger coffee fincas, some do it everywhere. They make perhaps $1.00 an hour, a little more, regardless of whose land they work on. As I’ve said before, the coffee here is Arabica and related sorts, top grade coffee. Bit by bit we learn more about how it all works.
You may remember that the coffee the big companies put in cans and use for instant coffee is robusta, and it is grown at low altitudes on flat plains, principally in Southeast Asia and Brasil, industrial-style. This is monocropping to the max, replete with the use of pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers. The soil is dying, rivers are contaminated, jobs hardly pay, etc. etc. This plantation-style coffee growing has depressed prices for all coffee including high grade pretty badly. Prices first fell dramatically in the late 1980's and haven't recovered. This year, for the first time in a while, prices for high-quality coffee have gone up a little. But this rise has not been reflected in the earnings of the producers and harvesters. In fact, in some cases, the earnings have gone down.
In our colonia, coffee production seems to work as follows. The coffee beans cluster densely along the branches of the plants, ripening at different times during the harvesting season. People -- men, women and children -- go out among the coffee plants, baskets tied around their wastes, and carefully select and pluck only the red beans until they can fill several sacks -- as many as they can carry on their backs and shoulders, or sometimes put in the back of pickups. They deliver the beans to a beneficio where they sell what they have harvested. There is a beneficio here in the Colonia. At the beneficioit the beans are hulled, dried, hulled again and sold in bulk to middlemen, or coyotes, who load them onto trucks to start their journey to wholesalers, exporters, importers and roasters – who all may or may not be associated with one company -- and on to coffee retailers who might roast some of their own. This is high-grade coffee we are talking about: the growers I think get about fifty cents a pound. If you buy it by the pound, you pay probably pay around nine dollars for the same pound. And what you should know is that everyone along the way makes a lot more than the coffee producers and picker.
Now here is something else you should know: that processor/exporter/importer types (which themselves are often embedded in giant multinationals) sell a lot of different kinds of coffee products. Many of these businesses have started marketing FairTrade coffee, but often this is kind of like a loss-leader: they devote only a tiny portion of their product space to FairTrade, enough to give them a good name with environmental and social justice types, while they hide the fact that most of their business is the exploitative kind. If you look at any of these large companies, you will see they all have environmental and social mumbo jumbo on their webpages. Like Wal-Mart selling organic and building a few green buildings. How much do you think Wal-Mart actually expends on its “green” efforts? How much does it affect their profit margins? How many workers actually benefit? How much are they actually improving the environment, especially in comparison to what they are damaging?
Interestingly, it seems US companies don’t dominate the profitable side of the wholesale coffee business. Nestle is Swiss, Agroindustrias Unidas de Mexico is part of a huge group called ECOM with offices (or whatever they are) in countries as far apart as Papua New Guinea (where they operate as Monpi Coffee Exports) to Japan to Britain and Brasil and the US. Café California is a subsidiary of Neumann Kaffee Gruppe, a holding company whose offices appear to be in Hamburg, Germany. The companies that dominate the retail end are Nestle and the US companies Kraft, Sara Lee and Proctor and Gamble.
What we see here is the glaring proof that on a local level in rural and semi-rural economies in poorer countries, globalization when it means the “free” market destroys lives (and creates emigrants). Ideally for free trade to succeed, producers would have access to “…perfect market information, perfect access to markets and credit, and the ability to switch production techniques and outputs in response to market information….” To the contrary, people living in our Colonia and our area and in many similar areas have none of this….and their lives are not conducive to developing these marketing resources. And in my opinion, they shouldn't have to develop them. Really, for people here to connect to the globalized economy would mean only that they would become more closely identified with a large company, not that their lives would necessarily improve. Some of the workers in coffee, in Viet Nam, for instance, where they grow the industrial way and work for large companies, may make less than fifty cents a day. They have become, essentially, beasts of burden.
There is no way I can see that globalization of the free market system as it is envisioned by global capitalists can lead to significant improvement in the lives of most of the people of the poorer areas of the world.
The farmers in our area are demanding government intervention to establish fair prices. There has been some movement, but not much. And currently people cannot survive on coffee because it is seasonal, the wages, which are low as it is, are even lower if you consider how much of the year people can earn them. Basically, what you have is a product which is an artesan product, a high quality product, having to compete with the cheapest of the cheap -- as if there were no difference between them. And the people here are forced to participate in a market system which shows no mercy. They have no way on their own to battle it aside from demonstrations. If they strike, or don’t pick, they can’t earn anything at all. There is no strike pay here.
So what do I advise? Or what do I wish we could do? Here’s what I suggest.
1. There are several certifications now available for coffee growers which are supposed to insure a fairer break for the farmer/harvester: FairTrade, the oldest; Transfair (USA fair-trade); International Federation of Organic Agricultural Movements (FOAM); Rainforest Alliance; and UTZ KAPEH.
I wrote a somewhat negative commentary on our neighbor Juan Calypso’s forum about FairTrade, et.al. The people in our Colonia don’t benefit from any of this certification at this point and I didn’t want them to get LESS money than they already did if all of us greeny types stopped buying Uncertified high quality coffee. But I have learned a lot since then, and I think maybe you folks in the U.S., should not only buy certified coffee, but also demand to know where OTHER coffee in your local coffee shops and supermarkets comes from: from field through processor, exporter, importer, etc. Don’t worry, it may all be one company. For instance, find out what kind of deals or contracts the owners of your friendly neighborhood coffee shop that looks all green has with their suppliers and who those suppliers are.
2. Not only should you buy only certified products, if you buy certified products put out by big companies like Nestle,ONLY buy their certified products. Don’t start feeling all warm and fuzzy because Nestle has an instant coffee called Partners which is Fair Trade and go and buy other Nestle stuff, for instance. I can assure you that Nestle is NOT a warm, fuzzy company. Let your friends know this is what you are doing. Let Nestle know.
Be willing to spend the extra ten cents a pound for certified products. Pay a little more, drink a little less. In your local Starbucks, say in a nice loud voice for the benefit of everyone standing behind you in line, that you know by buying certified you are working to restore ethics to business and giving producers a chance not to live in grinding poverty. AND helping the environment. Which leads me to say, buy shade-grown coffee. It doesn’t have to be certified organic, by the way. As I’ve mentioned before, shade-grown coffee is usually very close to organic by its nature.
EVEN MORE IMPORTANT, REMEMBER THAT ORGANIC COFFEE IS NOT NECESSARILY FAIR TRADE COFFEE IN ANY WAY AT ALL!!!! MAKE SURE YOUR ORGANIC COFFEE IS CERTIFIED BY ONE OF THE ABOVE GROUPS!!! For that matter, not all Fair Trade coffee is completely organic. It really doesn't have to be.
3.Finally, find out if any of your coffee shops or organic or gourmet
groceries or coffee providers deal directly with small-scale providers. Support those that do; find out if others would be interested.
What is The Economy for? Is it for itself – some giant parasite scraping the earth and its life to the bone to make more and more unneeded stuff to exchange for piles of money for the already very rich? Or is it a means to an end – should there be economies, rather than an economy, that provide the means for many different kinds of groups to nourish themselves, joining with each other in a flexible network.
Actions you take in buying your coffee make a difference. Coffee itself is a huge business -- I mean really huge -- among the biggest in the world. We all need to be Davids slinging stones at this Goliath.
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1 Not to mention that Nestle is apparently working on genetically engineered seeds to produce beans which turn into more easily soluble instant coffee. I bet you can hardly wait. The threat of genetically modified food crops is at least as significant economically as it is biologically (we have, after all, been genetically modifying crops ever since we humans discovered agriculture) because companies in control of them can dominate all aspects of production.
2 Fair Trade on Wikipedia is an excellent article summarizing just about everything having to do with FairTrade (as opposed to Free Trade). This quote comes from that article.
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