Text of an informal talk I gave last week for Fairtrade Fortnight

So it’s Fairtrade Fortnight here in the UK, and organizations like the Fairtrade Foundation and Oxfam are hosting events to engage people—consumers—in the idea and practice of fair trade through speaking tours, meet-the-farmer events, and…events like this one, which bring Fairtrade closer to your heart by also pleasing your palate (and making you feel a bit more receptive after the first glass, which makes me think we should have done the wine tasting before my little talk).

So why am I giving this talk? I am here from the University of Kansas Geography Department, on a six-month visit to work with Ian and generally get some exposure to geographies that I don’t have access to in Kansas Geography, so that I can get a well-rounded PhD. I work in ethical consumerism/consumption, a bit of rural development, and social movements. Before I started my MA in 2005, I lived for three years in Nicaragua, working for a fairtrade coffee cooperative as a project coordinator for a community-based rural tourism project in four rural communities in the mountains just north of Matagalpa, Nicaragua.

Now, I am sure we all have an understanding of fairtrade and ethical consumerism and perhaps a lot of you will have read the literature on it and will know some of the debates that surround it. Well, this is not an academic talk, so we won’t go into literature. Instead it will be about my experiences with fair trade in Nicaragua and in other places. What I aim to do is to give you a picture of how fairtrade works in a Nicaraguan cooperative, through the lens of my experience of the work I did with the cooperative during those three years and after. But let me start by asking you—what is fairtrade?

This is the question I asked myself one day in 2000 when I went into a café at UCLA after transferring there as a third-year undergraduate—I saw on the menu board ‘Fairtrade Dark Roast, 5 cents extra’. I bought myself a cup, looked at the poster on the wall that said something like ‘A Fair Deal for Farmers’, liked the flavor and kept buying it every morning, not thinking too much about how it was a fair deal for farmers, or why a fair deal was even needed. Soon after, I met the group of students that had just the year before campaigned to get that fairtrade coffee option into that campus café. I joined their group, and we continued working to try to convince the university to switch all of its coffee to fairtrade, getting students to write letters saying the five cents extra per cup was worth it. We didn't succeed while I was there. But I wanted to know more about fairtrade. I wanted to know what farmers did with this social premium. I suspected that there was more here than just a higher price.

But this experience did lead me to Nicaragua during my last year, via Fort Bragg, CA. I had gotten a grant to do fieldwork but did not have any contacts with fairtrade coffee farmers. I happened to be up in Fort Bragg working on a farm for the summer, and my friend’s mom suggested that I talk to Paul Katzeff, who owns Thanksgiving Coffee Roasting Company, and who she thought maybe worked with a cooperative in Nicaragua. Paul is an old hippy, a radical New York Jew living in No. California. Kind of has a reputation for being hard but visionary but is still a kind of old-timer father-figure in the fair trade movement. I and my friends went and met him at the his plant, where we sat on stools around a round rotating table filled with clear glasses of coffee samples, and chatted while Paul taught us how to cup coffee (that’s where you taste coffee under controlled conditions and classify its quality and cup characteristics. Like wine.). He offered us a smoke, and said, ‘Yeah, there are these great cooperatives in Nicaragua. They’re revolutionary. Literally. Came out of the revolution. We are finishing up a project with them to install nine rural cupping labs in the coops . That way they can keep improving their quality and they know what they are selling, so they can have some power when they negotiate with a buyer like me. Or someone less sympathetic.’

So I went to Nicaragua the following January for three months to do my undergraduate study on fairtrade. I got off the airplane at the airport in Managua, where a man in a Toyota pickup 4X4 picked me up. My Spanish wasn't that great, so I couldn't answer all his questions. I only knew he was from the cooperative. He drove me north for two hours through a hot, dry, flat, beige landscape, passing coffee processing mills along the way, and then we began rising into green mountains, finally arriving to Matagalpa and the office of CECOCAFEN, the cooperative. What I met when I arrived there, and later when I went to live in a rural community named La Reyna, was not what I expected. I don’t know what I had expected. I know I didn't expect running water only one or two days a week, or becoming an expert at one-bucket bathing.

What I walked into was a place of incredible history, struggle, and hopeful vision: an organized cooperative of 1600 coffee farmers with less than 10 ha each that most had received through the agrarian reform during the revolution of the 1980s, all organized into small base cooperatives originating in the revolution. Some of these base cooperatives had formed larger Unions of Cooperatives after the revolution was voted out 1989, when many of the rich large landowners who had fled the uprising and subsequent land confiscations of the Sandinistas and settled in Miami, returned and began using the courts and the new right-wing government to reclaim their farms, sometimes legitimately and often not. Small-scale farmers in Matagalpa, who before the revolution had been landless workers often working in slave conditions for the same families that were now returning, fought in the courts and also on the highways to protect their rights to their farms. It was their livelihoods at stake, and everything they had struggled for during the revolution, and organizing themselves into larger unions of cooperatives allowed them to act collectively to protect that.

After securing their lands in the early 1990s, these cooperatives and Unions of Cooperatives faced another challenge—commercializing their coffee. Farmers had two options—they could sell to the coyotes at whatever price they offered, usually not much, or they could look to the outside and get a better price. The cooperatives did have contacts, people and companies in Europe and the UK that had bought their coffee in solidarity during the revolution to help support it. Many of these solidarity workers had in fact formalized that kind of relationship and started fairtrade certifications or importing companies. In 1994 some base cooperatives and one union of cooperatives in Matagalpa joined into an umbrella cooperative called CECOCAFEN and exported their first container to Europe. 100% of the coffee they exported that year was fairtrade certified and in the years that followed they grew and used their growing market savvy to find other markets as well.

That’s the history. What I learned during those initial three months as I went about interviewing cooperative leaders and members, and lived amongst them in La Reyna, was that fairtrade was a continuation of the revolution, and not in any abstract way. The cooperative leaders of CECOCAFEN had all been guerrilla fighters during the struggle of the late 1970s before the Sandinistas overthrew Somoza, and now were leading a national cooperative movement; the members of the solidarity brigades that had come during the 80s to help harvest coffee or to be present in rural communities to deflect attacks on those communities by the contras, twelve years later had now become fairtrade business people or leaders of social justice or environmental NGOs or workers in development aid organizations and they kept their ties to Nicaragua; to small-scale farmers, the cooperative was a way of securing their land, dignity, and livelihoods. I fell in love with all of these visions and wanted to be part of it, and not just by convincing people to buy coffee with the fairtrade seal. I went back to LA to finish my last term, and returned to Nicaragua the week after I completed my degree.

I stayed for three years. When I first got there, I was idle for about five minutes, CECOCAFEN quickly took advantage of my English-speaking skills to accompany groups of buyers or visitors from development NGOs to interpret and entertain as needed. These NGOs were important, because CECOCAFEN was more and more taking on the role of administering development-type projects, aimed not only at improving coffee quality and commercialization capacity in the cooperative, but also at gender education, rural youth development, and, more and more, economic diversification. Economic diversification was crucial at that moment, in 2002, because the 'coffee crisis' was at its most deadly point. World prices had sunk to as low as 40 cents a pound and this had dire results on a country like Nicaragua. Five thousand workers were marching from Matagalpa to Managua to demand emergency aid and long-term development aid from the government after they were left without home or livelihood after 80% of the large haciendas where they were employed were closed. These were large latifundias that had been in operation since the mid-19^th century. At the same time, small-scale farmers, the most vulnerable to price swings, were abandoning their farms. Slums were quickly appearing on the hills surrounding Matagalpa, full of dispossessed rural people with nowhere to go. Only farmers belonging to fairtrade certified cooperatives were surviving and were able to stay on their land and continue producing.

Fairtrade certification was also crucial to the environment at that moment—people were clearing out their coffee to plant corn or raise cattle, anything but coffee, which meant essentially an environmental crisis in addition to the economic and social one—coffee in Nicaragua is grown under shade, so switching from coffee to cattle or corn means cutting down the shade trees above the coffee plants. Small-scale farmers with FT certification were less vulnerable, so did not have to abandon their land or cut down their coffee. As a response to the crisis, the cooperatives were adopting a strategy of integrated development, working with International NGOs to administer economic diversification, social development, and environmental projects. An entire development complex focused around fairtrade cooperatives developed in Nicaragua and in Central America.

In late 2002, I was hired to administer a community-based tourism project in five base cooperatives in four rural communities that were especially hard-hit by the coffee crisis because they were at lower altitudes. The major project goals were income diversification for the families involved, and increasing relationships with consumers. By community-based, I mean that from the beginning the idea was that the families involved would run the project and make the major decisions through a democratic structure. It is not easy for a coffee cooperative to go into the business of tourism, nor is it easy for a community of farmers with very low literacy levels, striking gender inequities, and low environmental consciousness to suddenly do things differently. We embarked on two years of training for the men and women who would house tourists in their homes, and for the sons and daughters of farmers who would be community tourist guides, as well as infrastructure improvement in the communities.

So groups of church members, university students, activists, and just curious people came to the mountains of Matagalpa to experience this fair-trade tourism project. Imagine yourself going through this experience—you are a middle-class person who knows about fair trade and buys fair-trade products. Your church organizes a study tour to visit coffee cooperatives in Nicaragua and you decide to go along. After visiting the cooperative office in a small city surrounded by green mountains, you are taken in an old schoolbus painted obnoxious colors north of the city along impossibly pitted dirt roads with cinderblock houses and wooden shacks hung with beer adverts on either side. After a couple of hours the bus stops. You are met outside by a young man named Alfredo who through the interpreter you learn is your guide. He tells you about the community you are in, its name is EL Roblar, it used to be a hacienda, there are two cooperatives, a men’s and a women’s. He then leads you walking up a muddy track up a mountainside and eventually to the house of Dona Dionisia and her nine children. He leaves you there with them. It takes you a couple of hours to get used to the dirt floor, the coffee growing seemingly up to the doorstep, and the overall unfamiliarity of it, but by dinnertime you are side by side with Dionisia’s daughters washing up and drinking coffee afterwards. You ask them about fair-trade, their lives. Your first reaction to their answer of, it isn’t enough is—it must be a fraud. But you continue talking, and you listen to their stories of forming a women’s cooperative and how that has changed their lives; how CECOCAFEN has invested in community projects, and much more. How they are starting to farm organically, how the daughters are attending school when their mother never had the chance. How much hope there is in the future. You see how the project of improvement is an everyday activity here. You return to your home in Exeter thinking that this visit was not about what fairtrade is doing, it was about what these people are doing to improve their lives, and your effort to buy fair trade gives them a step up.

I left this work Nicaragua in mid-2005 to go do my MA in Geography at Kansas. It seemed to make sense to me to write my MA thesis on the community-based tourism project, and after some dialogue with CECOCAFEN, we came up with a study that would serve as an evaluation of the long-term goals of the project and as my MA thesis. Four years after the project was begun, I conducted an email survey of North Americans who had visited the project, to see if, and how their visit to Matagalpan cooperatives had impacted their lives. The results? Most of the people who responded to the survey said their perceptions of fair trade had not changed radically as a result of the visit, but they had become conscious that just buying a labelled product was only the first step, and they knew there was more at stake than a price. I also went back to Nicaragua and interviewed the families in the project to see if the project was achieving its goals. They did feel they had a sense of belonging to something larger than their community, they knew people out there cared about them.

I was sitting in a café yesterday on Queen Street drinking a cup of coffee, and I wondered if I had a more concrete answer to that question I had asked myself in that café in UCLA. I can’t say that I am any closer to a concrete answer. Are you? I have come to understand fair trade as something either indefinable or something with many definitions. It depends on where you are. The point I want to get across, is that it is much more than a guaranteed minimum (‘fair’) price, much more than farmer organizations building their own capacity for engaging in the market on an equal footing, much more than long-term relationships between producers and buyers. The ‘indefinable’ part of fair trade is the ‘much more’ part—fair trade becomes a thing of the place(s) it is happening in, the people and culture of those places, and it is constantly changing. It is a process of interactions between producers, buyers, NGO, consumers, and everyone between and around these people and the places they occupy. It is affected by politics, personal relationships, and historical context. Its effectiveness at being ‘fair’ is impacted by these things. There are issues of access to the certification, issues of corporate involvement. The farmers I worked with at CECOCAFEN are now facing the problems of privatized water and electricity being sold at a premium, rising food prices, rising prices of cooking gas, rising prices of petrol. Fairtrade coffee prices provides stability and access to resources for farmers, but at this moment does not address all of these problems. They require more. Just as people within countries like Nicaragua are organizing and looking for solutions, so can we, so are we. It is hope that is required, but also a willingness to have open eyes. Look for the fairtrade label when you buy coffee, but then ask the question of why this is necessary in the first place.