Verge

Joe Tourist

Fall 2007

A fair-trade coffee cooperative in Nicaragua uses tourism to put much-needed dollars to work in their communities.

“It was the right thing to do after recovering from my illness.” Standing tall with pride on a ramshackle porch, his bronzed life-hardened face split between illumination and shadow, seventy three year old Aristedes Zeledon reveals to myself, and a delegation from Counter Culture – a coffee roaster from North Carolina - his simple motivation for building a quaint church for the farmer’s families. His stories of community benevolentness along with his impressions on the war, family and recent illnesses makes me forget about the chomping bugs and searing mid-day heat. Two dominant traits that emerge from his anecdotes are an adamantine drive and hope. And there’s a good reason why Aristedes exudes this confidence – he is a Nicaraguan fair trade coffee farmer.

Aristedes is nestled in the fertile Samulali region of Central America’s largest country and is among a growing number of Nicaraguan coffee farmers located in the verdant mountains surrounding the northern town of Matagalpa who are becoming affiliated with The Organization of Northern Cooperatives, or CECOCAFEN, in order to obtain a higher price (“fairer price,” in Zeledon’s parlance) for their coffee beans. CECOCAFEN represents 2,075 small-scale Nicaraguan coffee farmers like Aristedes helping them find buyers for 70,000 sacks of beans each year.

“We are a business-oriented organization that seeks out better market conditions for members,” says Felicity Butler, a British-born co-coordinator of the rural and community based tourism project at CECOCAFEN. As a photojournalist, I have been invited to Nicaragua by Felicity to learn about the agricultural and social benefits of fair trade coffee production and to participate and advance CECOCAFEN’s latest venture – the agro eco-tourism project. On this atypical damp January morning she is sitting with me at the rather humdrum CECOCAFEN headquarters in Matagalpa educating me on the ambitions of this unique tourism experiment that launched in 2003. “We put visitors in direct contact with the faces, voices and culture of the farmers who produce their coffee,” explains Felicity. CECOCAFEN’s project affords those from overdeveloped world like myself the rare opportunity to learn about the agricultural skills necessary to produce coffee, to sleep and gourmandize in the farmer’s homes, learn how to create traditional comestibles and to tramp among the lush surrounding countryside.

Felicity really peaks my interest when she informs me that tourists are encouraged to participate in the entire coffee production chain from picking the cherries to cupping the brewed java. Suddenly, I can barely wait to commence my home-stay with the farmer’s. Felicity sets her eyes on me and says brightly, “You’re in for first-class hospitality.” 

With light coming only from the gleam of a well-worn lantern and an almost preternatural canopy of stars, my first night at the La Corona community is spent in a modest adobe house discussing coffee farming and life in Canada with 58 year-old Juan Acuña – a congenial slight man whose sweat and blood has been poured into his 17-acre farm. The only thing keeping him busier than producing specialty coffee is watching over his nine children and, as Juan puts forth, “lots of grandkids.”

Four Nicaraguan fair trade communities (La Corona, El Roblar, La Pita, La Reyna) now open their doors to progressive tourists so a face and voice can be put to that cup o’ joe.

And farmers such as Juan are keeping their proverbial fingers crossed that this will assist in diversifying their incomes. Although the program is in its infancy with only a scattering of visitors, increasing interest in community and eco-based tourism globally is sure to make this endeavor a efficacious one.

Fair trade does deliver many social, economic and environmental benefits to Nicaraguan coffee farmers, but nonetheless it still falls short in helping families meet all their financial commitments, its avowed goal. The communities are very much interested in using the extra income generated through tourism to maintain and build roads, invest in new environmentally sustainable technologies, to educate their children and to invest in health care and social programs. Although, I was getting the feeling that the crux behind guiding bipedal tourists like me around was that I would become aware that people in my country need to know how hard people work to produce their coffee.

The benefit of tourist greenbacks is no more evident than in the La Pita community. With 15 coffee growing members, the additional funds above and beyond fair trade along with low interest loans provided by CECOCAFEN is affording member families the resources necessary to grow organic vegetable patches, buy mosquito nets, provide purified water, invest in extra rooms to house tourists, teach English to future guides, and purchase school supplies. It’s a win-win outcome: I take home the experiences necessary to promote fair trade as a real and viable alternative and community members have a chance to improve their standard of living and invest in environmentally sustainable technologies that make their surrounding countryside a healthy place for children and wildlife to romp around.

“I don’t even know all the animals that are up there,” says Sergio Garcia Diaz, the burly and utterly devoted coordinator of the eco-tourism project for La Pita speaking to a group of students from Kentucky’s Centre University (which ranks among a growing number of school delegations who are coming south to learn about fair trade and organic coffee agriculture). Sergio’s harmless unfamiliarity is directed towards the fauna in the blooming, sylvan slopes surrounding this cooperative.

Within moments of tramping up these same inclines, we bear witness to the benefits of growing coffee organically under the canopy of shade-giving trees. As groups of green parrots exchange perches overhead one could easily surmise that using tourism and fair trade dollars to plant native trees is a boon not only to the coffee bean which requires shade to mature properly but also to the spectacular birdlife multicoloured like rainbow sherbert.

“Don’t tear off the stem or no bean will grow there next year,” we are told by one of the community guides as she instructs us on the proper way to gather mature cherries from the trees. And so for the next hour or so as the mercury continually sneaks upwards, a sweaty bunch of gringos proceed to attempt to fill their baskets tied snugly around our bellies with what looks like spilt candy. It’s humbling work. A modicum two buckets of cherries is all a group of 25 is manage to collect. Our payoff? 36 Cordoba’s or about 2 American bucks according to Sergio.

Back on level ground my hostess Tomasa, a shy twenty-something farmer with a prominent silver front tooth rustles me up a plate of locally grown organic kidney beans, squash, salty cheese (cuajada), and corn tortilla. Perfect chow after a sweaty morning of coffee picking and hill hiking. In my best broken Spanish, I ask her what she likes most about living in this community. Answering my inquiry in even more fragmented English, she simply states “it happy place.” It’s just then that I realize opening my wallet to farmer’s like Aristedes, Juan and Tomasa - with such an unyielding commitment to family, the environment and producing a quality product - is money well spent.

Getting Involved

If you are interested in visiting Nicaragua’s fair trade coffee cooperatives you can obtain information from www.fairtradecoffeetour.com or you can contact Felicity Butler at turismo@cecocafen.com

To learn more about fair trade and to find a licensee in your neck of the words visit TransFair Canada at www.transfair.ca