(Photo: Jerome Taylor)For most Westerners, the notion of fair trade was born with bags of coffee from Nicaragua. Jerome Taylor sees how the ethical pound is transforming a nation
Published: 12 February 2007, The Independent
Fourteen years ago a small group of buyers from a little-known British coffee company arrived in the dusty Nicaraguan market town of Esteli. The veterans of the solidarity campaigns that supported the left-wing Sandinista government in their fight against United States-backed Contra rebels during the Eighties were going to see old friends at a farmer's co-operative. While they were there they bought a single container of coffee.
Those beans, sold in the UK under Café Direct's Fairtrade label, were part of a new movement that aimed to revolutionise the way the world did business. It hoped to transform the lives of coffee farmers from a powerless pool of labour for the multinationals to viable small-holders and experts in their own trade.
Their simple idea has become a mainstay for ethical shoppers in countries such as Britain. But it is an idea under attack and free-trade bibles such as The Economist have recently dismissed the scheme as little more than inefficient Western aid in disguise.
This is an argument lost on Alaides Vilchez Zamora. High up in the Nuevo Segovia mountains, in the same coffee-growing region where Café Direct bought its first container, Alaides has been working 15 hours a day harvesting a crop that is the world's second-most traded commodity after oil.
Under the flat, waxy leaves of the shoulder-height bushes lie bright red coffee cherries that need to be picked at just the right time. He places the ripest ones into a wicker basket tied to his waist before returning to his village where they are dried and then sent to the plains below to be washed and processed.
"I started with just one hectare that my father gave me but over the years I've been able to buy a few more small plots of land," says the wiry 28-year-old with an infectious grin that reveals a number of shiny gold teeth. "Even during the coffee crisis we were able to keep going."
There are about 25 million coffee farmers around the world and all remember the second coffee crisis of seven years ago. Almost overnight, international prices crashed. Hundreds of thousands of farmers from the cloud forests of Peru to the steep slopes of Kilimanjaro were forced out of business. It was yet another grim reminder of just how vulnerable coffee farmers are to the volatile international market and its wildly fluctuating prices.
Nicaragua, the second poorest country in Central America after Haiti, was hit hard. Unable to pay their debts, many farmers were forced to sell up and head to the city to join the burgeoning slums that are appearing across much of Latin America. Many more headed to neighbouring countries looking for cheap labour. They joined the one million Nicaraguans already living in exile, one-fifth of the country's entire population. But Alaides and thousands of his fellow farmers came through the crisis relatively unscathed thanks to a remarkable marriage over the past two decades between conscientious Western consumers and commercially astute farmers in the developing world.
Over the past 16 years Nicaragua has been undergoing a silent revolution, led by one of the most impoverished sections of society, the peasant farmers, or campesinos. It is a revolution that fundamentally challenges the traditional free market and its neo-liberal economics, which favours paying farmers the lowest price possible, leaving them powerless to do anything but sell direct to the multinationals at prices they dictate. It is a revolution that has allowed a group of people to produce, market and sell their produce on their own terms and in so doing challenge the multinationals that still dominate the trade.
On the plains below the Segovias, at the back of a processing plant built by the farmers using the extra money gained through Fairtrade, two young Nicaraguans are playing what, at first glance, looks like a game. Fatima Lopez and Alex Medina are sitting round a table full of steaming cups trying to guess which farm the coffee they are tasting comes from. Sucking the hot liquid off silver soup spoons they swirl it around their mouths before spitting it into a bowl. They fall about laughing each time the other gets a tasting wrong and holler triumphantly when they guess correctly.
But coffee tasting is not a game. It is a deadly serious business, one that can make the difference between making a profit for the farmers and a catastrophic loss. Not long ago, all taste testing was done by professional middlemen, the farmers were not trained in the art of knowing what western shoppers consider to be a good cup of coffee. But Fatima and Alex are not university graduates or profit-taking middlemen, they are the son and daughter of farmers who have become experts through training programmes run by the co-ops.
"Now we know what we are actually producing," says Fatima, who left school at 15 to work on the farm. "We never even knew what our coffee tasted like. Now we can tell farmers when they produce an amazing coffee." The farmers have come a long way from the days when coffee in the UK was sold through the Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign, where the joke was that you might be doing a good deed in buying Nicaraguan coffee but the price for that deed was a terrible-tasting brew. Yet despite two coffee price crashes, regular droughts, two devastating hurricanes and 16 years of a government that ignored the country's stricken agricultural industry in favour of a small urban elite, the coffee industry is not only surviving, it is thriving.
Campesinos earning little more than $2 (£1) a day have, collectively, been able to build multi-million dollar co-ops that can directly compete with the multinationals. The quality of Nicaraguan coffee has risen dramatically and farmers are increasingly beating Costa Rica, traditionally the best-quality producer in the region, in international tasting competitions.
What makes the success of Nicaragua's farmers so remarkable is that it is the ethically minded consumer in Western countries who has ensured the survival of Nicaragua's co-op revolution. Nicaragua now accounts for 8 per cent of the global Fairtrade market and most of the successful co-operatives that survived the coffee crisis say they were only able to do so because they could sell their crop at a guaranteed minimum price.
"Had Fairtrade not come along when it did, I don't think we would have survived," says Blanca Torrez, a former Sandinista who manages Cecocafen, one of the most successful co-operatives. "Before, all we were doing was selling our coffee locally at whatever price we could get, without any idea of the quality. We had no idea our coffee was any good." The arrival of Fairtrade in the early Nineties changed that.
"We started with nothing, just 35 farmers with no money and nowhere to meet," says Edmundo Hunoz (above), a farmer from the village of San Juan, when asked to recollect what it was like to return to coffee farming after years of civil war. "We desperately needed access to credit because coffee farmers only get paid once a year. That's when we realised we needed to form a co-operative."
The co-operative movement is a quintessentially Nicaraguan creation, heavily tied to the country's recent violent history. Born during the civil war as a way for farmers to continue growing crops and defend their land during the guerrilla war against the US-backed Contra rebels, it is perhaps not surprising that coffee farmers still look to co-ops to fight their current battle with the international markets and corporations.
Villages such as San Juan, where the black and red flags of the Nicaraguan revolution fly from every house, are Sandinista to a man. Much of the coffee producing regions were the front lines during Nicaragua's civil war, a war that claimed more than 60,000 lives in a country of little more than 5.5 million, and most farmers over 40 fought in the ranks of the Sandinista army.
By the end of the 1980s a truce had been signed between Daniel Ortega's Sandinistas and the Contra rebels who were determined to overthrow him. Nicaraguans slowly began to rebuild their country and the coffee farmers returned to their ravaged and land-mined farms. The one thing that helped them to return to making a living were relatively buoyant coffee prices.
But in 1991 the international coffee markets were liberalised, triggering the first worldwide price crash. The next year Nicaragua's campesinos were hit by another disaster, Ortega's government fell to be replaced by a coalition of right-wing parties who promptly cut all access to credit for coffee farmers, reversed much of the rural social reforms that had won international praise for the Sandinistas and began handing back farms to the landowners.
"The previous government completely abandoned the agricultural classes," says Cecocafen's president, Pedro Haslam, a former Sandinista guerrilla who was elected to parliament in November with the new Ortega coalition that finally ended 16 years of right-wing rule. "Poverty, illiteracy and inequality all increased. We may have had 5 per cent growth year on year but nowhere in the countryside has seen any improvements."
Driving north from Managua, the capital, into the coffee growing regions it is not difficult to see the shocking lack of infrastructure that has blighted the country's rural workers. Within minutes of turning off the smooth Pan American highway that leads away from Managua's fancy restaurants and international airport the roads soon give way to a pot-holed ribbon where progress of a even a few kilometres can be measured in hours.
Blanca Torrez argues that one of the co-ops greatest successes is the way the movement was able provide social services for its members when the government abandoned them. "During the 1990s we had to do what the government was not doing," she says. "We hired teachers, built schools and roads and saved up for health care. Why? Because the government totally abandoned the rural areas. I think the revolution taught us a lot of things but most importantly it taught us to get on and do things and not wait for outside assistance. You can't achieve things individually, you have to work together."
In San Juan, the villagers say they were only able to send their children to school in the neighbouring villages because financial support from the co-operative and the money earned through Fairtrade meant they could bus their children to the neighbouring village where the school is located.
"Look at the house you're in," says Edmundo Hunoz, as he sits on the wooden porch of his neighbour's house, eating a simple chicken stew with rice. "All 10 children here have been able to go to school and one has even gone to university. This would never have been possible without Fairtrade ensuring the success of our co-operative."
It is a success that is being replicated in many of Nicaragua's agricultural industries, including the sesame, nut, milk and cattle trades. Meanwhile, President Ortega has even suggested that the co-op model could be replicated nationally, something that will send the shivers down the spines of the old Cold War warriors in the Bush administration.
Nicaragua is now a powerful example of how Fairtrade has truly begun to challenge the free marketeers who have dominated countries in central and South America for decades and is a potent rebuttal to those neo-liberal economists who argue that Fairtrade is not working.
As the mid-afternoon sun begins its descent behind the crown of mountains that ring San Juan, Alaides starts preparing to take his latest patch of dried coffee beans down the hair-raising mountain road to the plains below. "We've been able to get through the bad years, we've survived," he says. "We are the lucky ones, we've been given the opportunity to think about and plan for the future, for our children's future."
