I spent three days this last week working on the Guatemala-Chiapas border, in communities that are part of a coffee cooperative called APECAFORM. And although I felt lucky to be able to spend time in such a remote and beautiful place (see photos), I couldn't escape the mounting evidence that the organic, Fair Trade, shade grown, microfinance, quality improvement, cooperative organization complex is failing these farmers. The majority of cooperative members live in tiny wooden shacks, without access to improved water and sanitation, and in many cases without electricity. Every family has sent at least one person to work in "El Norte." In the communities that make up APECAFORM, coyotes charge between 40,000-60,000 Quetzals ($5000-$8000) to smuggle a single person into the US. In the village where we stayed, the nearest pharmacy is over four hours away, and no one can afford the medicine they sell anyway. Don't believe the Fair Trade, organic marketing hype that the extra $5/lb you spend for "responsible" coffee has pulled certified farmers out of desperate poverty.
Really, though, the fault lies not so much with the cooperatives and the international certifying agencies, but in much larger macroeconomic processes. At each cooperative that I've visited so far, I've heard the same thing from almost every farmer: the slightly higher, consistent price we get from the cooperative helps, but the cost of basic necessities has increased so much in the last five years that we are worse off than before. A little research supports the coffee producers' claims. In the month of January 2007 alone, the price of the "basic food basket" in Guatemala went up 17%. In part, this is due to worldwide increases in the price of oil and other commodities. However, according to one article, a major factor in Guatemala is the fact that twenty years ago, the country was self-sufficient in corn and rice production, but now imports 40% of its corn, 66% of its rice, and 100% of its wheat.
Throughout my visit to APECAFORM, the human costs of nonexistent health care, lack of even the most basic infrastructure, and rising commodity prices became more and more evident. On the morning I left, completely exhausted from the previous day's trudge over a mountain, I opted to rent a mule to ride out to the nearest road. I won't even go into the personal pride and white guilt issues that came up riding a starving mule through the forest, with the mule's owner following behind on foot. At least it will provide a good crazy gringo story to the many bewildered children we passed on the two hour journey.
My companion for the morning was a 20 year old coffee farmer from the tiny village of San Juan Bullaj. And although we didn't speak the same native language, we kept up a steady conversation, pausing only to adjust the sweating mule's saddle or to try and remember a word in Spanish. Vincente recounted what it was like growing up on a small coffee farm, and how when his father died a few years ago, his mother gave up farming and moved away to a larger town. Both of his older sisters work in the US, one in Florida and one in Kentucky, and he hasn't seen either of them in five years. He grows coffee alone on a few hectares of steep land, and makes about three dollars a day.
I told Vincente about living in the US, about what the weather was like in the places where his sisters were living, about my own family. He had a lot of questions, too, mostly about why it was so difficult to get a visa to come to the US, and why I didn't have to pay to come to Guatemala. Eventually the talk turned back to coffee, and I told him some of his coffee probably ends up in my hometown. "Well," he said, "I don't know where my coffee goes." There was a long pause, broken only by the heaving breath of the mule. "What do they use the coffee for in the US, anyway?"
Every time I think of him looking up at me, asking an innocent question that has such an unjust answer, I start to cry. It took me a minute to realize that he really had no idea what happened to his coffee. The few years of school he must have attended taught him almost nothing about life outside of San Juan Bullaj, and no one bothered to tell him anything about the international system of trade and commerce and labor in which he participated without a choice. I explained to him that in the US, we drink coffee just like in Guatemala, only there, a single latte costs as much as he makes in one day. "Oh, I didn't realize," he whispered, and we climbed the rest of the way up to the road in silence.
