Rural Home stay -- Coffee Cooperative

As Central American style would have it our expected 2 hour journey to Estelí on Tuesday morning ended up taking about 5 hours.  Ex-military personal set up a tronke  blocking the road leaving Managua—so we had to turn around, head back to Managua, and  leave town heading the other way. As I have learned you never know what you are going to find when traveling here; it is always an adventure of some sort. We only spent one night in the town of Estelí (which is one of Nicaragua’s largest tobacco producing towns) and headed the next day on the second half of our journey further up into the mountains of Nicaragua.

 Our last home stay was in a community called Santule. This community, as many other Nicaraguan and Central American families, has a long history of coffee production.  In this sleepy little town of only about 200 people, there are about 12 small coffee cooperatives. Each cooperative’s members have coffee trees on their land to harvest and sell the beans; mostly organically produced. When it is time to harvest each cooperative member pools their crops together to sell to the buyers who buy the “green beans” as they call them. The beans are then roasted, packaged, and exported around the world.  

During these three days we spent up there we had the opportunity to stay with the farmers and their families. As we have been here for three months now, done a fair bit of traveling and stayed with a variety of different families; I have seen varying levels of poverty. However, the poverty in Santule, struck me. My family and all of the families had kitchens that consisted of dirt floors, a wood burning stove and maybe a dining room table. None of the families had running water; all of the water they used had to be carried in buckets from hand crank wells—there were two in the community. There was mostly no electricity. A few families, through international aid, have managed to buy solar panels to have a little bit of power to use in the nights. I say that I was struck by the poverty because going into the homestay I was very excited to see how an organic, fair trade coffee cooperatives worked and how they have improved the lives of the families.

 The farmers of the fair trade organic coffee get certified as an organic farmer (which costs the farmer around 4,000 US dollars) and this insures the farmer a certain minimum price for their crop even if the international market for coffee drops. I don’t understand how it can be labeled “fair trade” when the farmer, who is doing the majority of the work, might make around 6,000 US dollars a year. Yet to buy a bag of whole bean coffee from Starbucks for example costs $11.95.  While if the farmers had access to money to buy the machinery needed to take the coffee from harvest, to roast, to packaging and exporting; they could reap the real benefits of their work. The main pillars of fair trade are to; pay a fair wage in the local context, provide equal opportunities for all people, particularly the most disadvantaged and to provide financial and technical assistance to workers whenever possible. This is not to discredit fair trade, because I think that fair trade and cooperative work has done wonders for many different communities, but is fair trade really fair trade?