Made in the Shade

Last December I was in Minnesota, chatting with workers at Peace Coffee, a Minneapolis-based one-hundred-percent Fair Trade coffee company. To these guys, who make local deliveries on bicycle, Starbucks is the enemy. It’s a huge, non-transparent corporation; only a small percentage of its coffee is Fair Trade; and it doesn’t re-invest in the communities where it operates.

In January I was back in Nicaragua, chatting with Fair Trade coffee producers. It’s a different world. They love Starbucks. It may be that only a small percentage of the coffee bought by the caffeine behemoth is Fair Trade, but that’s still a massive amount of coffee. Starbucks is a godsend to these farmers, who may support the Sandinistas (the leftist party that led the Nicaraguan revolution from 1979 to 1990), but socially have little in common with U.S. liberals. They are typically gay-fearing churchgoers. The women do the cooking and watch over the children; the men carry machetes and work in the fields.

They are also poor. They use outdoor latrines. They cook over a fire. Meat is a rarity; dirt floors are common. Many households have electricity, but others do not. Fair Trade gives these farmers a bit of stability, though; it guarantees a fixed price that meets both the costs of living and production. That price is above those offered by the extremely volatile regular market, but it does not make the farmers wealthy.

Still, it does help them produce the best coffee in the world. The fact is, most coffee is crap. Producing quality coffee is just not cost effective on a large scale. While you can pull a banana off a tree and eat it, a good cup of coffee is the result of a long, labor-intensive process whose many steps must be approached with skill and care. Only small producers have the time.

They grow their coffee in the shade, using arabica plants, which grow more slowly and yield less, but don’t end up tasting like sawdust. During the harvest, farmers pick only the ripe coffee berries, returning to the same plant week after week until the berries are gone. As they dry the coffee, they sort through the beans and throw away anything discolored or damaged by insects.

On huge plantations, owners cut down trees to grow their coffee in the sun. They use the inferior robusta plant, and during the harvest produce thousands of sacks of coffee a day. Workers pick the berries all at once, and there’s no time to pick out bad beans. These beans are cut with small quantities of arabica, because otherwise the coffee would be undrinkable and wind up in cheap instant mixes, or the auto-drips at Ye Olde Truckstop.

Nicaraguan coffee farmers are poor, but they’re not miserable. Life in the countryside is pleasant. People live in shacks, but these shacks are not one foot away from their neighbors, as they would be in the city. There are trees and mountains and lakes in every direction. Families are strong, and though people work hard, they seem to enjoy themselves.

Twenty-year-old Byron Gámez gave me a tour of his family’s lands. Byron’s mother is the president of a women’s cooperative, formed because the men in the mixed cooperative insisted on making all the decisions. Byron is also one of my English students. He calls me “Mister Teacher,” and likes to say things like, “I am Mister Tired.” He is endlessly amused by a question he once asked in class: “How do you say say?” and repeats it every time he sees me.

Byron showed me a neighboring farm that is nothing but a forest of stumps. He explained that disease wiped out their coffee crop. “That’s one of the disadvantages of not being part of a cooperative. You don’t have easy access to credit.” A loan of eighty dollars would have covered the chemical needed to prevent the disease.

Fair Trade organizations must guarantee access to loans. They also generally help out when disaster strikes, such as the recent hurricanes in Guatemala and Mexico. Companies like Peace Coffee want sustainability and long-term relationships; they’re in trouble if their suppliers lose their farms.

Cecocafen is a Nicaraguan Fair Trade organization that serves as middleman between families like Byron’s and companies like Peace Coffee. They have funded community water projects, better farm equipment, and new schools in rural coffee areas. They are also sending Byron to school.

Then there are the cupping labs. In the past, farmers rarely tasted their own product, they just provided raw beans. They had no idea what the quality of their coffee was, much less an incentive to improve it. Cecocafen provides training on how to make good coffee, and processes it locally so the farmers can taste it. Not only can farmers earn a premium for producing better coffee, but they can take real pleasure in their work.—Katherine Glover