Erstellt am: 26. 11. 2011 - 13:00 Uhr
Working for a Pittance
In a remote corner of the Nicaraguan cloud forest, at the end of a bumpy track, half eroded by the recent rains and watched over by howler monkeys, 55 year old coffee farmer Anselmo Valdiva greets me with a welcome present - it's a coconut that he has knocked from his tree with a pole and spliced with his machete.
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Laughing, he shows me how to drink the milk, throwing his head back and pointing the husk of the coconut skywards.
With the top four buttons of his shirt undone and his wide stance, moustachioed Anselmo looks like the stereotypical Latin American macho. But the cliché fades as, with a self-effacing grin and shy chuckle, he says he "almost died of shock" during the last major price slump in 2004 which bankrupted several neighbouring farmers. He is the biggest farmer in his cooperative and had enough savings to scrape by, but the experience led him to join the fair trade system with its inbuilt safety net.
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This safety net brings, according to Fairtrade itself "peace of mind and stability but also the ability to plan ahead." So why doesn`t everyone join and protect themselves and their farms from the strange moods of the global commodity markets? Anselmo says that many of the farmers haven't heard of the concept or at least haven't understood it properly. Already struggling to make ends meet, what they see is a list of potentially costly regulations.
Being a fair trade farmer means adhering to a set of social and ecological standards. Children have to go to school rather than being employed as cheap labour during the harvest and any hired workers have to be paid the minimum wage. The trading partnership stipulates which pesticides can be used and how much they can be sprayed. Organic growing is encouraged and organic beans fetch a higher price. But, although he is experimenting, Anselmo says he is terrified by the Broca beetles which can destroy a crop and is not yet ready for to renounce artificial pesticides.
Despite employing up to 40 seasonal pickers at peak harvest time, Anselmo is far from well-off. His hacienda is ramshackle. It's built on small stilts and under the floorboards scrawny chickens hide from the heat. Nearby a stinking open cess-pit attracts flies. There is nothing romantic about this scratched out existence.
But the coffee fields themselves are stunning to look at high up in the cloud forest.
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The altitude is vital for the quality of coffee and the rules of the fair trade partnership insist that the coffee is "shade grown". This means the dark green, shiny-leafed bushes grow under the canopy of leafy mango, banana and mandarin trees. All around moss, and giant ferns grow wild. The farms in a dozen different shades of green.
Shadow growing is good for biodiversity, says ecologist Myna Isis Moncada Fonseco, because all sorts of animals, birds and insects find a home in these emerald palaces. The sun-blotting canopy also regulates the way water trickles down into the rich volcanic earth after rainfall and this keeps the soil healthy and stops erosion when the heavy rain comes.
Anselmo Valdiva says he was using most of these ecological methods even before joining the fair trade system so it wasn't a great step up for him. But for many small-scale farmers producing fair trade coffee involves investment - and many fear that's a luxury they can't afford. Yet, to encourage and compensate this investment, the co-operatives get a "fair trade premium" which can be used for community social projects or handed straight back to the farmers to invest in improving their coffee bushes and farming tools before next year's harvest.
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Producer co-operatives are owned and democratically run by their member farmers. Small co-operatives melt into bigger co-operatives such as the Cecocafen in the main town regional Matagalpa which represents 2,637 members.
The director Maurizio Ruiz says that the fair trade premium has mostly been to improve education for the campesinos' children - with grants worth $300,000 a year providing books, pens and even scholarships for higher education. The money is also used to improve waste-disposal and local transport and has put into a cervical cancer screening program that Ruiz says has saved many lives. These are not projects dictated from the fair trade representatives from the north - the projects are chosen by an elected assembly representing all the campensinos.
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I travel to a small village called La Reina to see how the premium helped in practice. It is shortly before sun-set when I arrive and children are playing baseball, Nicaragua`s national sport, under the wide shade of a Guanacaste tree. The general secretary of the local co-operative, 55 year old Emelda Argo shows us the local school house and describes how the premium provided the capital to make the transition to less chemicals. She points to some green walled shacks up a slope in the bushes. They are part of President Daniel Ortega`s rural home-building project, new rudimentary houses for just $2,000 dollars. The premium provided the capital for villagers to take advantage of that scheme.
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Although Emelda says it was difficult at first to persuade some of the men in the village that a woman was now in charge of decision making, it is thankfully no longer a surprise that the general secretary of a local rural coffee planter cooperative in Nicaragua is a woman. Like much of Central America, Nicaragua has a reputation for machismo, but the women are fighting back against the patriarchal system. The make-up of the Cecocafen regional fair trade assembly in Matagalpa is a case in point. Half of the members of the assembly are women and a woman is its president, a graduate of one of the educational scholarships.
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But sometimes the women have to fight tooth and nail for their rights. Decked out in her Sunday best clothes, 54 year old grandmother Dionicia welcomes me to her farm in the community of Yasika at 900 metres above sea level, nestled in an ampitheatre of green jungly peaks. Over a meal of gallo pinto (red beans and rice) and chicken stew cooked in her simple mood-floor kitchen, she explains how she became a pioneer of women`s rights in her community. She and her husband joined a collective when they moved to the village, however Dionicia discovered she was allowed to pay membership fees but not vote. In 1985, much to the horror of her abusive husband, she pulled out and founded a rival collective of 28 women. The men were furious and said the women would achieve nothing alone. But she fought a legal battle to keep her patch of land and a hut. She now helps and advises victims of domestic abuse.
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With thick calloused fingers, she shows me how to harvest the raw coffee berries, cafe en uva, plucking the few ripened red berries from the mass of unripe green ones and popping them in her basket. Coffee picking requires speed and dexterity, as the left-leaning European brigadistas found out in the 1980's when they travelled to Nicaragua to support the revolution by helping with their harvest. I`m clumsy but Dionicia, smiling at my efforts, whips the red berries from the bush with speed and precision. Many of her children have moved away, but she wants two of her sons to stay in the coffee producing area. ´
"It`s a hard life," she says, "But it is our tradition."
Coffee producers bring their burlap sacks of coffee to a collection point and then the local co-operative drives them by truck to a processing plant - or beneficio - near Matalgalpa. A foreman cuts into the sacks with a special knife to test the quality of the beans. 98% is exported to North America or Europe with just the lowest quality staying in Nicaragua.
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Behind the delivery area the beans are laid out in the sun to dry. They look yellow now like shelled peanuts and each sack is laid on a plastic sheet so they can be quickly collected up if it rains. Women rake over the piles so that each bean gets its share of the rays and none get burned.
The rakes look heavy and wieldy and despite the sweltering heat the women are covered by clothes: - hoods, face-scarves, long sleeved shirts clothes and long trousers. They look like Bedouin nomads in a sandstorm, . One of the girls, Maria who is from the countryside around Matagalpa gives me a quick lesson in raking in slow rhythmical strokes. After a minute I´m sweating although I'm just wearing a light T-shirt. But Maria says it is better to be too hot than be burned by the sun. She tells me the work is hard, but it is only seasonal work and the money is "good" - by that she means 6 dollars a day, a reward for which she is happy to work unbroken stints without days off during the high season. Economists say a family of 5 would need 400 dollars a month to make ends meet. Clearly huge parts of the population don't manage that.
Finally, after watching the coffee being roasted in a smoky room, I head to the cupping room to see the end product being tested for quality. Moustachioed José is an energetic man who has been tasting coffee for the best part of 25 years. When I ask him if ever gets bored of the taste he looks at me like I was mad. Besides, he wasn't born with a silver spoon and the gift of his sensitive palate has saved him from the hard labour involved in much of the rest of the coffee producing industry.
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He has a swivelling table laid out with what look like small soup bowls of black coffee. Hot water has been poured over the ground and a small crust has formed. He washes a spoon, breaks the crust, scoops up a few millilitres and sucks them up with high-pitched noise that reminds me of the flushing of an aeroplane's lavatory. He then swills the coffee around his mouth; apparently the top of your tongue tastes the sweetness, the side of your tongue the bitterness and the side of your mouth the saltiness, and then spits it out and explains its taste. It is long explanation, like that of a wine-bore, in Nicaraguan Spanish and all I can gather is that it tasts vaguely of wood. But José looks pleased with it. Obviously a good wood.
From here, their quality now rubber stamped, the beans are to be transported down to the coast for shipment to the world markets where, particularly in this time of a price boom, they go for a song. Some will eventually end up mixed together with a sea of milk in the polystyrene cups that have become the essential accessories of city workers in a rush. Some might end up trickling from whirring Italian espresso machines. Few people will give a thought to where the coffee they are drinking came from. But next time I jolt myself awake for a morning shift with a shot of Nicaraguan coffee I will think of gentle but indomitable Dionicia, who has braved the fluctuations of the global market and the rage of the men of her village, and is still producing coffee in her emerald palace high up in the cloud forests above Matagalpa - for a pittance.
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