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Todo el tiempo estamos en lucha.
-- Mateo Antonio Rendón, manager of FESACORA, the
Salvadoran organization of agrarian reform
cooperatives
Where does your morning cup of coffee come from? If you can answer that question, you probably already know more about the politics of that beverage than most North Americans who drink it.
El Salvador since the '80s
I traveled to El Salvador in early February with a group of eight other Ohio residents and three Equal Exchange employees to learn how the harvesting and production process worked. Equal Exchange is a 40-employee worker-owned fair trade coffee company in the Boston area that buys directly from democratically-run farmer cooperatives in Latin America and other coffee-producing regions.
Four members of our group were coffee and wine buyers for Heinen's, a family-owned Cleveland supermarket chain with 13 stores; other Cleveland participants were owner Jeff Heinen, two teachers who had won a shoppers' essay contest, and an activist who helped sell Equal Exchange coffee at Heinen's and other local stores. This was the first trip EE had sponsored primarily for middle managers who had direct contact with the shoppers who buy the coffee.
Those who have done solidarity work with El Salvador know that since the end of the 12-year civil war in which about 80,000 were killed, the tiny nation has been in U.S. headlines only when natural disasters have struck -- Hurricane Mitch in 1998 and the latest earthquakes a year ago. As in the rest of the Global South, ordinary people's daily struggles for survival continue unnoticed. With the signing of the peace accords by the government and FMLN guerrilla forces in 1992, most Salvadorans were able to stop fearing for their lives, but the poor have actually grown poorer in the intervening decade.
Our interpreter for part of the trip, agronomy graduate student Ernesto Mendez, noted that many people appreciate the changes that allow them to express their political opinions, "but they say, 'That's nice, but it doesn't put food in our stomachs'." An estimated 12,000 children a year die of malnutrition and preventable diseases.
Another problem on the horizon -- or on the front doorstep -- is the escalating militarization of Central America. The U.S. government is using its "war on drugs" to re-arm the region; President Francisco Flores has allowed the United States to establish a military base in El Salvador, and George Bush II is scheduled to visit on March 24 -- the anniversary of the death squad assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero -- to meet with the Central American presidents about a Central America Free Trade Agreement and anti-terrorism and anti-drug policies.
How fair trade helps farmers
Our delegation met with officials from the organization of agrarian reform cooperatives and the small coffee producers association, and traveled to two coffee co-ops in the countryside. Fair trade coffee means the difference between survival and death for these co-ops. World coffee prices have plummeted recently, and the $1.26 that Equal Exchange pays for each pound of coffee is keeping the co-ops afloat when the world market price is 45 to 50 cents a pound. (Two years ago, it was $2.40 a pound.)
Plunging prices have an immediate effect on farmers already living on the financial edge. Just a few examples: Matt Lowen, who works with the U.S. solidarity organization Guatemala Accompaniment Project, said in a recent e-mail message that the campesino coffee growers with whom he works are receiving so little, 25 cents a pound, they're considering leaving the berries on the trees rather than harvesting them. Thousands of Nicaraguan coffee farmers and their families would have starved last year had it not been for food donations from other countries. And the majority of the 14 Mexican men who died of exposure in the Arizona desert while attempting to cross the U.S. border in May 2001 had been employed on coffee farms in Veracruz state before prices dipped and put them out of work.
There is currently disagreement among international solidarity and development organizations, such as Oxfam, about the World Bank's role in financing coffee planting in Vietnam and how this has affected the international coffee market. In any case, the price farmers are receiving for their crop is at an all-time low, while prices charged consumers in the Global North, especially for gourmet grades, remains high and steady. The middle layers in the coffee business are grossly profiting from this enormous disparity. Fair trade companies like Equal Exchange buy directly from the farmer co-ops, eliminating the middle people, and pass their modest profits on to their employees and shareholders, whose shares pay an annual dividend but don't appreciate in value. (And their CEOs aren't exactly in Enron Land -- the highest annual salary paid at EE is $55,000.)
EE provides prefinancing for the co-ops when Salvadoran banks won't go near their small operations. The wealthy families that own the banks are the same forces that have always opposed agrarian reform, and Salvadoran presidents and other government leaders still come from these families with large land holdings. Apecafe, the Association of Small Coffee Producers of El Salvador, is classified as a non-governmental organization (NGO) and is able to arrange some financing and pre-financing through the banks. Apecafe provides other services to the co-ops, such as quality control, linking growers and buyers, and obtaining Reuter's market prices.
Equal Exchange is also working in Ohio on its first fair-trade clothing sale. Students at Kent State University recently contacted the company to see if employees knew of any non-sweatshop suppliers of college athletic wear. In an effort to reduce their dependency on the volatile coffee market, EE's trading partner in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico, UCIRI, runs a clothing factory and is developing jams made from tropical fruits such as mango. Kent State's order of a thousand T-shirts in the school colors is the first foreign order for the clothing factory, Xhiinaguidxi, which means "Work of the People" in the local indigenous language.
Coffee from tree to cup
To see the coffee production process in action, our delegation met first with the members of Las Colinas co-op, near the small town of Tacuba in the northwestern department of Ahuachapán close to the Guatemalan border. Las Colinas, with 99 members and its own processing facilities, is a wealthy co-op for El Salvador. The finca, or plantation, belonged to one owner until 1980, when the government's short-lived, sporadic agrarian reform turned the land over to the campesinos who had worked for the dueño. In 1986, the co-op purchased its own processing machinery, which enabled it to receive a higher price for its crop. This has brought material benefits including the ability to hire more teachers and buy supplies to expand the local elementary school from 1st and 2nd grade up to 7th.
Alfredo Rumaldo Asencio, coordinator for Apecafe, energetically led our tour of Last Colinas and demonstration of the coffee production equipment. The harvest had taken place several days before our arrival. Workers drove trucks full of coffee berries, which are slightly smaller than sweet cherries, to Last Colinas, where the berries are "wet processed." The fruit is washed, with water piped from the spring above the co-op land, into large rectangular concrete holding ponds, where the higher-quality berries sink to the bottom and the less-dense ones float to the top. Then each batch of berries is flushed into two depulpers -- perforated, tube-shaped, copper-colored rotating bins that tumble the berries, removing the outer skin and sticky inner fruit, which coffee producers call "mucilage."
What's left is the coffee bean, which is an ivory color -- later roasting produces the rich brown we see in the supermarket and coffee shop -- and waste water, called agua miel, "honey water." The stuff resembles thin honey, but its odor is acrid at best, nauseatingly fermentative at worst. We could smell it all over the campo as we traveled. The agua miel flows downhill into earthen holding ponds, and the coffee beans are washed through pipes from the depulping station to concrete patios on the hillsides below, where workers spread the beans with flat wood rakes into neat rows to dry in the sun. They turn the rows several times a day so that the beans dry evenly, maintaining 13% humidity. Las Colinas has oven-drying equipment, but the process uses precious firewood and doesn't work as well -- patio drying is traditional and creates a higher-quality bean, Alfredo told us.
The coffee dries for 10 or 11 days, then the co-op members put it into burlap sacks that hold 1.5 quintales, or a little more than 150 pounds. The beans are bagged with the pergamino, or parchment-like husk, still on. When the co-op receives an order, the workers prepare it for shipment in a huge barn next to the drying patios. The beans run through machines that shake off the pergamino, then onto a conveyor belt where two dozen women work 9-hour days to clean the final product, picking out beans that are cracked or rotten.
The European coffee buyers are more demanding than the U.S., Alfredo said; samples are tested from each coffee shipment several times, including at the port before shipping, and European buyers will accept only a few imperfections per sample.
The second co-op we visited, El Pinal, is in La Libertad department near the capital, closer to the epicenter of last January's earthquakes. Many members of the 34-family co-op lost their houses, which are composed primarily of adobe or of red brick. But only one woman was injured and no one was killed, because the quake occurred late on a Saturday morning when the co-op members were lined up to collect their pay at the cooperative office, which suffered almost no damage.
Co-op representative Jorge García Rojas showed us where his home had been destroyed and the nearby dirt road where residents had had to live for a month after the collapse of their houses. The road itself had enormous cracks in it so that residents couldn't leave the area and had to wait for food and supplies to be brought in by helicopter. Apecafe helped fund temporary houses of plastic sheeting and corrugated metal in which people are still living. Area residents have received help from some international NGOs, but there's been almost no government aid, and it will take thousands of dollars to rebuild all of the homes using brick and mortar.
The quake also damaged the coffee fields, leaving cracks in the land up to a kilometer long. A team of workers filled these within two weeks, but the co-op members felt fortunate that the rainy season wasn't heavy last year and they were spared further landslides. Some coffee trees were lost to landslides, so this year's harvest was down to about 1000 quintales from last year's 1500.
The harvest was in progress at El Pinal, and the workers showed us how to pick the bright red berries. EE sales manager Jessie Myszka climbed down the steep mountainside with a basket around her neck and picked about six pounds. The rest of us were impressed until Cleveland Spanish teacher Rita Danks spoke to a co-op member sitting on the office porch -- the woman was probably in her 70s and told Rita she walked three-quarters of a mile from her house to the fields each day, picked 150 pounds of beans, and then walked home.
Ernesto Mendez and Rosario Castellon, EE's producer relations coordinator, said that most Salvadoran coffee producers are reluctant to grow their crops using organic methods -- the country is so small and competition for land so fierce, farmers have traditionally forced every bit of food they can out of their tiny plots using anychemical methods at their disposal. But the poorer co-op we visited, El Pinal, and other cooperatives are in the process of having their product certified "ECO OK," which could ultimately lead to the use of organic farming methods. ECO OK, a label created by the U.S. organization Rainforest Alliance, allows the use of some chemical pesticides and fertilizers, but specifies certain living conditions for the workers and preservation of at least 10 native tree species on the land -- "coffee forest" has replaced true rainforest areas in El Salvador.
Jeff Heinen and the coffee and wine buyers who work for his chain were interested in the ECO OK certification, but noted that it would be a tough sell in the United States -- consumers understand the idea behind organic farming and look for organic products, but biodiversity is a more complex concept to grasp.
Politics and business as usual
In a creekbed next to one of the steep, winding roads to Las Colinas, we saw the results of one of the two fatal bus accidents that were in the Salvadoran headlines early this year. The government responded to the problem by inspecting buses and pulling unsafe ones off the roads, and the drivers responded with a partial strike.
The government is also repaving roads -- in some places replacing what the earthquakes destroyed, in others providing jobs where few exist. I thought these impressive-looking new cement roads might be a sign of improvements in El Salvador, until our group met with Leslie Schuld, the director of Centro de Intercambio y Solidaridad, a solidarity organization in San Salvador.
Leslie, a U.S. citizen who's lived in El Salvador the past 8 1/2 years, said that the president of the right-wing ARENA party, Roberto Murray Meza, owns all of the cement factories in the country (and all of the soda and beer distribution companies) and is making an enormous profit from the exclusive contract for new roads. He's also ARENA's presidential candidate in the upcoming elections, she said.
Leslie thinks the FMLN (Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional), the leftist party of the guerrillas who forced the Salvadoran government to the negotiating table in the early '90s, represents the only hope of any substantial change in the country and has a decent chance of winning the presidential elections in 2004. The party has had a base of supporters among the educated in the cities, she said, and is now making inroads in rural areas, where people have been able to see for themselves the FMLN's relative efficiency in running municipalities, compared to neighboring villages with corrupt governments run by ARENA or more moderate PCN mayors.
The corruption, right-wing hegemony, and natural disasters continue to strain the environment and economy. El Salvador is the second-most deforested nation in the western hemisphere; the desertification was obvious as we flew over the country at the height of the dry season. The economy is entirely dependent upon money sent home by the 2 million Salvadorans working in other countries -- out of a total population of 8 million.
The spread of NAFTA-like free trade agreements and the re-militarization of Central America will only worsen the economic situation of the poor. Nicaragua Network reported recently that the Nicaraguan government is sending military officers to be trained at the U.S. Army School of the Americas (or Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation) for the first time since the Somoza regime of the 1970s. Cold War or drug war, it spells bad news for our friends and neighbors in Latin America.
Equal Exchange coffee and tea is sold at Global Gallery and Trader Joe's. Michele Spring-Moore is a former editor of the Rochester (NY) Committee on Latin America newsletter and a member of the newly-formed Ohio Working Group on Latin America; she can be reached at: springbyker@yahoo.com.
Where does your morning cup of coffee come from? If you can answer that question, you probably already know more about the politics of that beverage than most North Americans who drink it.
El Salvador since the '80s
I traveled to El Salvador in early February with a group of eight other Ohio residents and three Equal Exchange employees to learn how the harvesting and production process worked. Equal Exchange is a 40-employee worker-owned fair trade coffee company in the Boston area that buys directly from democratically-run farmer cooperatives in Latin America and other coffee-producing regions.
Four members of our group were coffee and wine buyers for Heinen's, a family-owned Cleveland supermarket chain with 13 stores; other Cleveland participants were owner Jeff Heinen, two teachers who had won a shoppers' essay contest, and an activist who helped sell Equal Exchange coffee at Heinen's and other local stores. This was the first trip EE had sponsored primarily for middle managers who had direct contact with the shoppers who buy the coffee.
Those who have done solidarity work with El Salvador know that since the end of the 12-year civil war in which about 80,000 were killed, the tiny nation has been in U.S. headlines only when natural disasters have struck -- Hurricane Mitch in 1998 and the latest earthquakes a year ago. As in the rest of the Global South, ordinary people's daily struggles for survival continue unnoticed. With the signing of the peace accords by the government and FMLN guerrilla forces in 1992, most Salvadorans were able to stop fearing for their lives, but the poor have actually grown poorer in the intervening decade.
Our interpreter for part of the trip, agronomy graduate student Ernesto Mendez, noted that many people appreciate the changes that allow them to express their political opinions, "but they say, 'That's nice, but it doesn't put food in our stomachs'." An estimated 12,000 children a year die of malnutrition and preventable diseases.
Another problem on the horizon -- or on the front doorstep -- is the escalating militarization of Central America. The U.S. government is using its "war on drugs" to re-arm the region; President Francisco Flores has allowed the United States to establish a military base in El Salvador, and George Bush II is scheduled to visit on March 24 -- the anniversary of the death squad assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero -- to meet with the Central American presidents about a Central America Free Trade Agreement and anti-terrorism and anti-drug policies.
How fair trade helps farmers
Our delegation met with officials from the organization of agrarian reform cooperatives and the small coffee producers association, and traveled to two coffee co-ops in the countryside. Fair trade coffee means the difference between survival and death for these co-ops. World coffee prices have plummeted recently, and the $1.26 that Equal Exchange pays for each pound of coffee is keeping the co-ops afloat when the world market price is 45 to 50 cents a pound. (Two years ago, it was $2.40 a pound.)
Plunging prices have an immediate effect on farmers already living on the financial edge. Just a few examples: Matt Lowen, who works with the U.S. solidarity organization Guatemala Accompaniment Project, said in a recent e-mail message that the campesino coffee growers with whom he works are receiving so little, 25 cents a pound, they're considering leaving the berries on the trees rather than harvesting them. Thousands of Nicaraguan coffee farmers and their families would have starved last year had it not been for food donations from other countries. And the majority of the 14 Mexican men who died of exposure in the Arizona desert while attempting to cross the U.S. border in May 2001 had been employed on coffee farms in Veracruz state before prices dipped and put them out of work.
There is currently disagreement among international solidarity and development organizations, such as Oxfam, about the World Bank's role in financing coffee planting in Vietnam and how this has affected the international coffee market. In any case, the price farmers are receiving for their crop is at an all-time low, while prices charged consumers in the Global North, especially for gourmet grades, remains high and steady. The middle layers in the coffee business are grossly profiting from this enormous disparity. Fair trade companies like Equal Exchange buy directly from the farmer co-ops, eliminating the middle people, and pass their modest profits on to their employees and shareholders, whose shares pay an annual dividend but don't appreciate in value. (And their CEOs aren't exactly in Enron Land -- the highest annual salary paid at EE is $55,000.)
EE provides prefinancing for the co-ops when Salvadoran banks won't go near their small operations. The wealthy families that own the banks are the same forces that have always opposed agrarian reform, and Salvadoran presidents and other government leaders still come from these families with large land holdings. Apecafe, the Association of Small Coffee Producers of El Salvador, is classified as a non-governmental organization (NGO) and is able to arrange some financing and pre-financing through the banks. Apecafe provides other services to the co-ops, such as quality control, linking growers and buyers, and obtaining Reuter's market prices.
Equal Exchange is also working in Ohio on its first fair-trade clothing sale. Students at Kent State University recently contacted the company to see if employees knew of any non-sweatshop suppliers of college athletic wear. In an effort to reduce their dependency on the volatile coffee market, EE's trading partner in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico, UCIRI, runs a clothing factory and is developing jams made from tropical fruits such as mango. Kent State's order of a thousand T-shirts in the school colors is the first foreign order for the clothing factory, Xhiinaguidxi, which means "Work of the People" in the local indigenous language.
Coffee from tree to cup
To see the coffee production process in action, our delegation met first with the members of Las Colinas co-op, near the small town of Tacuba in the northwestern department of Ahuachapán close to the Guatemalan border. Las Colinas, with 99 members and its own processing facilities, is a wealthy co-op for El Salvador. The finca, or plantation, belonged to one owner until 1980, when the government's short-lived, sporadic agrarian reform turned the land over to the campesinos who had worked for the dueño. In 1986, the co-op purchased its own processing machinery, which enabled it to receive a higher price for its crop. This has brought material benefits including the ability to hire more teachers and buy supplies to expand the local elementary school from 1st and 2nd grade up to 7th.
Alfredo Rumaldo Asencio, coordinator for Apecafe, energetically led our tour of Last Colinas and demonstration of the coffee production equipment. The harvest had taken place several days before our arrival. Workers drove trucks full of coffee berries, which are slightly smaller than sweet cherries, to Last Colinas, where the berries are "wet processed." The fruit is washed, with water piped from the spring above the co-op land, into large rectangular concrete holding ponds, where the higher-quality berries sink to the bottom and the less-dense ones float to the top. Then each batch of berries is flushed into two depulpers -- perforated, tube-shaped, copper-colored rotating bins that tumble the berries, removing the outer skin and sticky inner fruit, which coffee producers call "mucilage."
What's left is the coffee bean, which is an ivory color -- later roasting produces the rich brown we see in the supermarket and coffee shop -- and waste water, called agua miel, "honey water." The stuff resembles thin honey, but its odor is acrid at best, nauseatingly fermentative at worst. We could smell it all over the campo as we traveled. The agua miel flows downhill into earthen holding ponds, and the coffee beans are washed through pipes from the depulping station to concrete patios on the hillsides below, where workers spread the beans with flat wood rakes into neat rows to dry in the sun. They turn the rows several times a day so that the beans dry evenly, maintaining 13% humidity. Las Colinas has oven-drying equipment, but the process uses precious firewood and doesn't work as well -- patio drying is traditional and creates a higher-quality bean, Alfredo told us.
The coffee dries for 10 or 11 days, then the co-op members put it into burlap sacks that hold 1.5 quintales, or a little more than 150 pounds. The beans are bagged with the pergamino, or parchment-like husk, still on. When the co-op receives an order, the workers prepare it for shipment in a huge barn next to the drying patios. The beans run through machines that shake off the pergamino, then onto a conveyor belt where two dozen women work 9-hour days to clean the final product, picking out beans that are cracked or rotten.
The European coffee buyers are more demanding than the U.S., Alfredo said; samples are tested from each coffee shipment several times, including at the port before shipping, and European buyers will accept only a few imperfections per sample.
The second co-op we visited, El Pinal, is in La Libertad department near the capital, closer to the epicenter of last January's earthquakes. Many members of the 34-family co-op lost their houses, which are composed primarily of adobe or of red brick. But only one woman was injured and no one was killed, because the quake occurred late on a Saturday morning when the co-op members were lined up to collect their pay at the cooperative office, which suffered almost no damage.
Co-op representative Jorge García Rojas showed us where his home had been destroyed and the nearby dirt road where residents had had to live for a month after the collapse of their houses. The road itself had enormous cracks in it so that residents couldn't leave the area and had to wait for food and supplies to be brought in by helicopter. Apecafe helped fund temporary houses of plastic sheeting and corrugated metal in which people are still living. Area residents have received help from some international NGOs, but there's been almost no government aid, and it will take thousands of dollars to rebuild all of the homes using brick and mortar.
The quake also damaged the coffee fields, leaving cracks in the land up to a kilometer long. A team of workers filled these within two weeks, but the co-op members felt fortunate that the rainy season wasn't heavy last year and they were spared further landslides. Some coffee trees were lost to landslides, so this year's harvest was down to about 1000 quintales from last year's 1500.
The harvest was in progress at El Pinal, and the workers showed us how to pick the bright red berries. EE sales manager Jessie Myszka climbed down the steep mountainside with a basket around her neck and picked about six pounds. The rest of us were impressed until Cleveland Spanish teacher Rita Danks spoke to a co-op member sitting on the office porch -- the woman was probably in her 70s and told Rita she walked three-quarters of a mile from her house to the fields each day, picked 150 pounds of beans, and then walked home.
Ernesto Mendez and Rosario Castellon, EE's producer relations coordinator, said that most Salvadoran coffee producers are reluctant to grow their crops using organic methods -- the country is so small and competition for land so fierce, farmers have traditionally forced every bit of food they can out of their tiny plots using anychemical methods at their disposal. But the poorer co-op we visited, El Pinal, and other cooperatives are in the process of having their product certified "ECO OK," which could ultimately lead to the use of organic farming methods. ECO OK, a label created by the U.S. organization Rainforest Alliance, allows the use of some chemical pesticides and fertilizers, but specifies certain living conditions for the workers and preservation of at least 10 native tree species on the land -- "coffee forest" has replaced true rainforest areas in El Salvador.
Jeff Heinen and the coffee and wine buyers who work for his chain were interested in the ECO OK certification, but noted that it would be a tough sell in the United States -- consumers understand the idea behind organic farming and look for organic products, but biodiversity is a more complex concept to grasp.
Politics and business as usual
In a creekbed next to one of the steep, winding roads to Las Colinas, we saw the results of one of the two fatal bus accidents that were in the Salvadoran headlines early this year. The government responded to the problem by inspecting buses and pulling unsafe ones off the roads, and the drivers responded with a partial strike.
The government is also repaving roads -- in some places replacing what the earthquakes destroyed, in others providing jobs where few exist. I thought these impressive-looking new cement roads might be a sign of improvements in El Salvador, until our group met with Leslie Schuld, the director of Centro de Intercambio y Solidaridad, a solidarity organization in San Salvador.
Leslie, a U.S. citizen who's lived in El Salvador the past 8 1/2 years, said that the president of the right-wing ARENA party, Roberto Murray Meza, owns all of the cement factories in the country (and all of the soda and beer distribution companies) and is making an enormous profit from the exclusive contract for new roads. He's also ARENA's presidential candidate in the upcoming elections, she said.
Leslie thinks the FMLN (Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional), the leftist party of the guerrillas who forced the Salvadoran government to the negotiating table in the early '90s, represents the only hope of any substantial change in the country and has a decent chance of winning the presidential elections in 2004. The party has had a base of supporters among the educated in the cities, she said, and is now making inroads in rural areas, where people have been able to see for themselves the FMLN's relative efficiency in running municipalities, compared to neighboring villages with corrupt governments run by ARENA or more moderate PCN mayors.
The corruption, right-wing hegemony, and natural disasters continue to strain the environment and economy. El Salvador is the second-most deforested nation in the western hemisphere; the desertification was obvious as we flew over the country at the height of the dry season. The economy is entirely dependent upon money sent home by the 2 million Salvadorans working in other countries -- out of a total population of 8 million.
The spread of NAFTA-like free trade agreements and the re-militarization of Central America will only worsen the economic situation of the poor. Nicaragua Network reported recently that the Nicaraguan government is sending military officers to be trained at the U.S. Army School of the Americas (or Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation) for the first time since the Somoza regime of the 1970s. Cold War or drug war, it spells bad news for our friends and neighbors in Latin America.
Equal Exchange coffee and tea is sold at Global Gallery and Trader Joe's. Michele Spring-Moore is a former editor of the Rochester (NY) Committee on Latin America newsletter and a member of the newly-formed Ohio Working Group on Latin America; she can be reached at: springbyker@yahoo.com.