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.
