Mountain Groan
JANUARY 2001
Resource Center of the Americas
By JULIE GROSSMAN

EL BOSQUE, MEXICO

 Hours after sundown, Lucía Gonzáles Ruiz watches anxiously out the door of her dirt-floor house in this highland municipality of Chiapas, Mexico's southernmost state. She wonders why her husband, Lucio Gonzáles Ruiz, hasn't returned home to El Bosque since leaving this morning on the three-hour bus ride to the city of San Cristóbal de Las Casas. His only task there, she explains, was to withdraw money from the bank for Mut Vitz, a coffee-growing cooperative the family helped form in 1997.

 Lucía recalls the last time she waited up this late for him to come home. Police had arrested him the afternoon of August 2 and thrown him in jail for the night on spurious charges of starting a fight. The bail cost $120, a considerable sum for a family whose annual income is $800. The police also confiscated checks and documents the co-op needed to register with authorities as a business.

 "I just want to know he's safe," Lucía says. Her husband finally arrives home in the middle of the night. Today's holdup was not police harassment; it turns out, but bureaucracy at the bank.

 Running a farmer co-op is not easy in Chiapas, where the government is waging a low-intensity war against an indigenous movement called the Zapatista National Liberation Army. Since the Zapatistas launched a 12-day armed campaign January 1, 1994, the day the North American Free Trade Agreement took effect, rebel sympathizers among the state's nearly 1 million indigenous inhabitants have faced unrelenting intimidation by police, paramilitary groups and federal troops.

 Mut Vitz, which means "Bird Mountain" in the Mayan language Tzotzil, has made no secret of its affiliations. Putting Zapatista self-sufficiency tenets into practice, the co-op's 780 farmers are part of a global "fair trade" movement that connects Third World producers to northern consumers, bypassing profiteering intermediaries. Mut Vitz leaders say foes of this self-sufficiency are behind a string of vicious attacks here, including seven murders this year. Regardless of their affiliations, farmers everywhere in Chiapas feel the impact of such large-scale attacks as the December 22, 1997, paramilitary massacre in the village of Acteal.

 The violence heightens barriers to market access facing peasants throughout the Third World. The barriers range from language differences to unreasonable organic-certification costs to lagging consumer demand for fair-trade products. Last year Mut Vitz produced more than fair-trade importers could buy, forcing the co-op to sell for a pittance to local hustlers known as coyotes who gather beans for the corporate-dominated global industry.

 To the Chiapas farmers, fair trade means something more than economic independence. "We are not only in the process of organizing to export coffee," says Mut Vitz farmer Mariano Gonzáles Gonzáles. "We want to show consumers that indigenous people have dignity."

 ROASTED

 Generating $18 billion in annual sales, coffee is the world's second-largest legally traded commodity after oil. Each year the United States, the largest coffee importer, consumes about a fifth of the total. The bean is the most important agricultural export for dozens of Third World countries, including Mexico, the chief U.S. supplier.

 Coffee has been a cash crop since colonial times, when serfs planted and harvested the bean on feudal estates. In Mexico, Porfirio Díaz's 1876-1911 dictatorship transformed the industry, heaping financial incentives and technical assistance on international coffee entrepreneurs that allowed them to set up large plantations, some covering more than 1,200 acres. In Chiapas, the incentives attracted investment from French, U.S., German and Spanish interests. The foreign control meant that most profits left the country instead of spurring local development.

 Peasants, pushed off the most fertile land, have tried to compete against the plantations. But their efforts invariably fail, owing to a lack of credit, processing infrastructure and access to stable international markets. The vast majority of the world's 25 million coffee farmers live in desperate poverty.

Their lives revolve around a volatile world price set by a Wall Street commodity exchange. Since an international coffee pact collapsed in 1987, this price has hovered around $1 for a pound that retails for as much as $10. Compounding the exploitation are intermediaries who charge farmers exorbitant rates for financing, equipment and transportation.

The small-scale farmers sometimes end up with as little as $0.30 per pound, less than a third of what it costs to produce the coffee. Few make more than $600 a year (the annual cost of a daily latté in the United States), and most are trapped in an endless cycle of debt. In 350 of the 411 Mexican municipalities where coffee is cultivated, according to government figures, farmers live in extreme poverty. Chiapas, Mexico's leading coffee producer, is the nation's poorest state.

Here in El Bosque, a rugged 30 miles north of San Cristóbal, small-scale farmers had only one option for selling coffee until fair-trade co-ops formed. The coyotes would arrive at harvest time with pickup trucks and crooked scales, purchasing 140-pound bags the farmers had hauled to the roadside on their backs.

"The coyotes would always tell us our coffee was poor quality, even though we knew otherwise," recalls Gonzáles Ruiz, the Mut Vitz member. "We knew that the coyotes were not paying us well, but we had no other place to sell it."

The coyotes sell the beans to exporters who supply four food conglomerates that roast, package and market most of the world supply. The firms are Cincinnati-based Procter and Gamble (Folgers), New York-based Philip Morris (Maxwell House), Chicago-based Sara Lee (European brands) and the largest, Swiss-based Nestlé (Hills Brothers).

Of the price U.S. consumers pay for coffee, the small-scale farmers receive roughly 10 percent. About 30 percent goes to the coyotes and exporters, and 25 percent to retailers. The largest share, 35 percent, goes to the four corporations.

JOE JUSTICE

Throughout the Third World, the early 1980s saw an increasing number of small-scale coffee farmers organizing themselves into cooperatives. In most co-ops, the farmers continued working their own plots, usually less than 10 acres, but joined together to process the beans (remove the pulp, allow fermentation, and wash and dry them) and to market and export the yield.

Their success hinged on a new breed of international importer concerned about the economic plight of Third World farmers. The U.S. pioneer was Equal Exchange, based in Canton, Massachusetts, which formed in 1986.

In 1988, when the world price for unroasted beans dropped more than 50 percent to $0.60 per pound, the Dutch-based nonprofit Max Havelaar began certifying fair-trade coffee and licensing a retail logo so consumers could identify it. The organization agreed with the co-ops on a uniform coffee price that would remain constant no matter how low the market dropped. The floor price would cover production costs and provide a modest return for the co-ops. The co-ops had to run democratically and invest the return into production upgrades, quality improvements and development projects such as schools and health clinics. Certified importers, for their part, had to pay the floor price, provide the co-ops with credit and long-term contracts, and deliver the coffee directly from farmers to retailers, arranging for shipping, roasting, packaging and distribution.

By 1992, as the world coffee price plunged to $0.48 per pound, interest in fair-trade coffee was spreading fast across western Europe. In the mold of Max Havelaar, certifying agencies in other northern countries were taking root. TransFair USA, the U.S. certifier, formed in 1995.

The fair-trade movement leaped forward with the 1997 founding of the Fairtrade labeling Organizations. Based in Bonn, Germany, the FLO develops international licensing criteria, ironing out differences between Max Havelaar, TransFair USA and 15 other national initiatives. On the production end, the FLO runs a registry of 200 certified coffee co-ops, representing 500,000 farmers in 18 countries. The FLO monitors the co-ops at least every two years. (Besides coffee, the FLO sets criteria for tea, cocoa, honey, sugar, bananas and orange-juice concentrate. In the United States, coffee remains the only certified product.)

By 1999, the FLO was certifying some 25 million pounds of fair-trade coffee annually, still a tiny fraction of the 13 billion-pound worldwide yield, but rising fast. Today's FLO-maintained floor price, $1.26 per pound, has kept farmers above water as market prices have dropped as low as $0.68 this year. When the market price exceeds the floor, certified importers must pay the going rate plus a $0.05-per-pound premium. The FLO also requires importers to pay the co-ops 60 percent of the cost prior to shipment.

One of the world's most successful fair-trade cooperatives is just west of Chiapas in the state of Oaxaca. The 2,200-family Isthmus Region Indigenous Communities Union (UCIRI) has used its surplus to establish a farm supply center, health-care services, cooperative corn mills, an agricultural extension and training program, the region's only secondary school and its only public bus line.

A few plantations claim to have joined the fair-trade cause, but there is no certification to verify how they treat their workers. The 1,000-acre Finca Irlanda, a German-owned coffee plantation in southern Chiapas, seems to provide workers decent wages, hours and safety protections. It employs some farmworkers permanently, instead of just for the harvest. And it provides amenities such as a children's playground and a garden that produces employee food.

Some plantations "genuinely care for their workers, and some are paternalistic city-states run by benevolent dictators," explains Bob Thomson, managing director of the Ottawa-based TransFair Canada. "There is no way of telling them apart at this point without actually visiting them unannounced and having sufficient local background and coffee experience to sift out truth from greenwashing."

Even certification does not guarantee labor conditions. In a fair-trade co-op, the bigger farms often must hire harvest labor even though they lack decent housing, bathrooms, meals and child care. The hired hands often live in squalor.

 

ORGANIC 'MAFIA 

Chiapas elders can remember a time when all farming was organic. Most coffee grew on shaded mountains and hills without synthetic pesticides or fertilizers.

In recent decades, corporate-backed plantations across Latin America have converted to high-yield varieties that grow in direct sunlight. Cutting down shade trees for this coffee has contributed to severe soil erosion, deforestation and destruction of habitat for migratory songbirds and other animals. And the high-tech crops depend on chemicals that contaminate soil and groundwater. In the 1970s, the U.S. Agency for International. Development pumped more than $80 million into this "modernization."

 Since 1990, when the Mexican government's Coffee Institute was dismantled and world coffee prices were plummeting, most small-scale Chiapas farmers have not been able afford chemicals. Many have decided to pursue organic farming-composting, using natural enemies against unwanted insects, and fighting erosion by building terraces or planting tree rows known as "living fences"-simply because it's cheaper than the high-tech method.

By 1998, Mexico had 111,000 acres under certified organic coffee cultivation, rivaling Peru, the hemisphere's other leading organic producer. Certification means the coffee can carry an "organic" logo when retailed. The farmers usually receive an extra $0.15 per pound. 

But while most fair-trade coffee farms are organic, only about 15 percent have completed an organic certification process. One reason is that it tends to limit them to a single national retail market. The segmentation owes largely to northern ministries of agriculture and consumer protection that prefer their own national certifying agency, such as Germany's Naturland or the U.S. Organic Crop Improvement Association. Until recently, northern governments didn't trust Third World certifying bodies.

Another hurdle to going organic has been the cost of certification. Including transportation, food and lodging for inspectors, the bill for a co-op the size of Mut Vitz can run more than $1,800. Many in the Chiapas coffee industry describe an "organic mafia" that dominated the certification process until a few years ago. Monika Firl, a technical adviser for Mut Vitz when the co-op formed, said the certification inspectors were unreasonable. "They wouldn't stay in cheap hotels and eat tacos in the streets," she says.

Organic certification also requires farmers to carry and store coffee in expensive burlap sacks instead of plastic bags, and it forces them to devote scarce resources to building cement patios and fences to keep chickens and other animals away from the drying beans.

Yet another obstacle is a three-year wait before a farm is certified as organic. The requirement is supposed to ensure that chemical residues in soils have broken down and deactivated, but it seems pointless on farms that haven't been able to afford chemicals for years, if ever. "It guarantees a market for inspector services, but it doesn't necessarily make the products any more organic," Firl says. "Suddenly paperwork is more important than the work in the field."

A step forward was the 1998 creation of Certimex, a Mexico-based agency that certifies coffee for the Naturland logo. The agency uses local inspectors and relaxes some of the unreasonable standards.

Even farmers who have jumped through all the hoops may fall short of organic standards. The Mexican government backs mass aerial sprayings of malathion to fight the Mediterranean fruit fly in citrus fields. Careless spraying has harmed coffee and shade trees. In Tziscao, a village near the Guatemalan border, members of a 30-family farm co-op called Lagos de Colores say an unidentified crop-duster sprayed a chemical that killed some of their coffee plants last year.

Plantations have an easier time with organic certification than do cooperatives of poor farmers. The bigger the business, the more likely it is to have telephones, computers, vehicles, roads and multilingual staff members. And decisions can be made more quickly by a single owner than by a co-op aiming for democracy among hundreds of members. A German organization certified Finca Irlanda, the southern Chiapas plantation, as organic in 1962.

Certified fair trade, similarly, requires considerable paperwork and deft communication with overseas agencies. Such organizing is usually beyond the means of small-scale Chiapas farmers, most of whom lack the communication and transportation infrastructure. Many can't read or write, moreover, and many speak only their Mayan language fluently, not Spanish, let alone German or English.

For these reasons, many cooperatives rely on outside funding and technical assistance to secure fair-trade and organic certifications. In 1991, the Rockefeller Foundation's Mexico City office financed the transition for Unión Majomut, a co-op of 1,500 farmers north of San Cristóbal that sells primarily to European importers.

 

ACID TESTS

Most Majomut farmers support the Zapatistas, and the co-op bars its members from belonging to paramilitary groups, the government-backed rightist bands that attack rebel supporters. But Majomut claims neutrality in the Chiapas conflict. Co-op technical adviser Víctor Pérez Grovas notes a FLO requirement that farmer co-ops admit members regardless of political and religious differences. (It's unclear how the requirement affects certification.)

 Mut Vitz, another FLO-certified co-op, identifies itself with the rebel movement. Its U.S. buyers include Peace Coffee, the St. Paul-based Cloudforest Initiatives and the Human Bean Company, based in Denver, Colorado.

Some in the fair-trade movement call it unwise to pitch the coffee primarily as a means for consumers to express solidarity. Pérez Grovas points to Café Sandino, the Nicaraguan coffee marketed in the 1980s as a way to support that nation's 1979 revolution. He says the brand went belly up amid quality problems and waning consumer loyalty after the 1990 electoral defeat of the Sandinista National Liberation Front. "Solidarity works only for a year or two," he says. "After that, you need high-quality coffee."

Human Bean director Kerry Appel counters that his company, founded in 1996, has flourished based on consumer preference for coffee that supports indigenous rights. "It tastes good to their palate and it feels good to their social consciousness," he says.

Appel visited Mut Vitz regularly until August, when Mexican authorities revoked his business visa for the second time, saying his statements in support of indigenous rights had "violated the sovereignty of Mexico."

Appel sees it differently. "If the Mexican government were not committing human rights violations, then I would not be speaking of murders and war," he says. "I would really, really like to be telling our customers that there is democracy, liberty and justice in the area where our coffee is produced."

Politically neutral or not, fair trade in Chiapas has received no government support. On the contrary, the low-intensity war against the Zapatistas spreads terror through farm cooperatives. With peace talks stalled since 1996, Mexico City has concentrated 70,000 army troops in the state. Paramilitaries have killed hundreds of farmers and forced thousands to abandon their crops and seek shelter in squalid refugee camps.

After the farmers flee, the soldiers and paramilitaries often steal or burn the crops. Such pillage followed the notorious attack in Acteal, 20 miles north of San Cristóbal, where paramilitaries slaughtered 45 unarmed indigenous people. The village produced coffee for Majomut. 

The intimidation also takes subtle forms. Co-op leaders are arrested on specious charges. Troops and police stop farmers in their fields, demanding identification. Military vehicles roar past coffee villages. Farmers stumble upon soldiers sleeping under their coffee plants.

The army occupation makes it difficult to do the weeding, compost application and pruning necessary for an organic crop. More than 150 Majomut members had to drop out of the co-op's certified-organic program last year because they feared soldiers stationed near their plots.

Conditions are similar on Mut Vitz farms. Co-op leaders describe the seven murders in the area this year as "assassinations." The atmosphere resembles Guatemalan terror in the 1980s, when that nation's military slaughtered coffee cooperative leaders.

Farmers hope the attacks will subside now that elections have ousted the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) from control of both the federal and state governments. Vicente Fox of the conservative National Action Party (PAN) took the presidential reins December 1, and Pablo Salazar Mendiguchía of an eight-party alliance took over as Chiapas governor a week later. An encouraging sign was the October 27 arrest of leaders of a feared paramilitary group called Peace and Justice. It remains to be seen whether the new rulers will ease the pressure on coffee farmers who sympathize with the Zapatistas.

Regardless of what the Mexican government does, the farmers will be more secure if more U.S. consumers choose fair trade. "It's very important to us that consumers understand our work, how it feels to suffer beneath the sun as a campesino," says Gonzáles Ruiz, the Mut Vitz farmer. "Knowing what our lives are like, they'll purchase our coffee."

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For more information about Fair Trade in Chiapas, check out the video: "The Strength of the Indigenous People of Mut Vitz: Producing Fair Trade Organic Coffee in the Highlands of Chiapas" by the Chiapas Media Project and the Mut Vitz Coffee Cooperative available for $25.00 at: http://store.globalexchange.org/mutvitz.html

This video looks at the lives and work of the organic coffee farmers of the Mut Vitz Coffee Collective. The Mut Vitz Cooperative began in 1996 and currently has more than 1000 members. The video was shot and digitally edited by two video makers who are members of the collective. Over a year in the making, The Strength of the Indigenous People of Mut Vitz traces the entire organic coffee production process: from seedling to transplant, from cultivation to the roasted bean. The video shows us the challenges that the collective faces in processing their coffee for market and their achievements using a Fair Trade model of distribution. (Tzotzil and Spanish, with English subtitles, 27 minutes, 2000)

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