Special Brew

Adventure Travel

January/February 2008

A new hybrid of eco tourism and ethical farming is developing to help keep rural communities afloat. Matt Kadey goes in search of the perfect morning cuppa, helping out on a fair trade, organic coffee farm in Nicaragua.

“It was something good to do after I got better.” Slumped back in his white plastic chair perched on a ramshackle porch, seventy three year old Aristedes Zeledon explains his simple motivation for building a quaint church for the local farmer’s families. With an air of avuncular kindliness, his stories of such community benevolence along with his ardent opinions pertaining to family, the country’s history of bloodshed and recent illnesses makes me along with a delegation from Counter Culture – a North Carolina coffee roaster brush off the chomping bugs and searing high noon heat. Two dominant traits that emerge from his anecdotes are a fervent drive and hope. And there’s a good reason why Aristedes exudes such resoluteness – he is a Nicaraguan organic fair trade coffee farmer.

Aristedes, nestled in the mountainous fecund Samulali region of Nicaragua, is among a growing number of northern small-scale coffee farmers 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.

As he guides us through his half-hectare farm we pass by aging equipment guarded diligently by a boisterous black canine. Standing tall with pride dressed in his best collared Sunday shirt under a row of hand-planted, shade-giving cedars, he professes the benefits he has received in the last three years with CECOCAFEN. “Before fair trade, I had to sell most of my organic beans at conventional prices,” claims Aristedes through the aid of an interpreter. “I could not afford to keep my farm running the way it deserves.” It seems as though his fortunes could have easily come to a calamitous end. But a prominent smile on his round, trustworthy face is a dead give-away that things are much better now.

The events that had brought me to this coffee farm in Central America’s largest country were set in motion several months earlier. As a professional scribbler, I had penned a piece about the social, economical and environmental benefits of fair trade agriculture. Researching this article peaked my interest in what seemed like a win-win situation for consumers and farmers alike. I agree to fork over a slight premium for my daybreak java so farmers and their families can afford the basic creature comforts of life like health care and a roof that won’t leak during suppertime. And in return, farmers agree to adhere to strict ecological growing methods that will produce a superior tasting brew.

With another numbing Canadian winter fast approaching that would I normally endure with general melancholy, I became increasingly interested in seeking out warmer climes. A quick Google and a few email confabs, and I learned that there was a new tourism program afoot among several of Nicaragua’s fair trade coffee communities. Before you could say gringo, I accepted with alacrity an invitation to come on down leaving the big chill behind. Soon I was airborne over towering volcanoes on my way to a country that is most interested in replacing strife with tourism.

“We put visitors in direct contact with the faces, voices and culture of the farmers who produce their coffee,” says Felicity Butler, a British-born co-coordinator of the rural and community based tourism project at CECOCAFEN. On what I have been promised is an atypical damp and dreary January morning, she is sitting down with me at the modest CECOCAFEN headquarters in Matagalpa giving me the scoop on their recent venture into agro eco-tourism: an endeavor that affords those from the overdeveloped world (au courant or not) the rare opportunity to learn about the agricultural skills necessary to produce coffee, to participate in this coffee production and to sleep and gourmandize in the farmer’s homes. Not to mention plenty of opportunities to tramp in the communities verdant countryside.

Consumers from the north have traditionally stood aloof from producers in the south. Felicity and the farmers represented by CECOCAFEN hope this unique type of tourism can help change that. Felicity says brightly, “you’re in for first-class hospitality.”

A dilapidated mountain road leads to La Carona, a fair trade community set among romantic views of flourishing coffee-draped mountains leaping upward to grab hold of the cerulean sky. The bus is filled with a dozen or so boisterous students from Massachusetts Bridgewater State College that are guided by James Hayes-Bohanan, a burley bearded mild-mannered geography professor who, for the last couple of Januarys, has brought his students to Nicaragua’s northern fringes to learn about the positive impacts of trading equitably. “They may not know it now, but by the end of this trip these guys will have a much greater appreciation for where their morning cup o’ joe comes from,” James yelps as a thundering drop into a doozer of a pothole sends our noodles disturbingly close to the roof.

Happy to have two feet firmly placed on the ground, La Carona initially strikes me as a hodgepodge of activity. Wide-eyed kids scamper about, a group of women are busy preparing our mid-day repast and in the background a stalwart man stands a top a foliated hill manually de-pulping freshly harvested coffee cherries. The unsullied air has become malodorous with their aroma. As I snap a few photos of a seasoned farmer and his dignified cowboy hat, it’s clear he is embarrassed to be the subject of my fuss.

But there’s little time for photography or to even catch my bearings as our community guide Alfredo Rayo promptly whisks us into the coffee fields.  The weather is looking bad as rain spits from lowering clouds. Alfredo is a twenty-something seemingly ubiquitous svelte Nicaraguan youth who is among a growing number of men in his age bracket that are being trained to foster tourists understanding of organic fair trade coffee farming. As the rain begins to fall in diaphanous sheets and biting ants wage war on my defenseless feet, an undeterred Alfredo carries on dishing out fascinating tidbits of information pertaining to the complexities of growing quality coffee in harmony with Mother Nature.

In the wet hour or so I spend with him, I learn that for many of the cooperatives located in La Carona, growing coffee means time-consuming pruning and weeding with machetes, taking advantage of pulp as a natural fertilizer, ensuring ethical working conditions and practicing agriculture sans chemical inputs. “This used to be a baseball field,” Alfredo says as he pulls down a branch to show the students a blushed cherry that’s ready to be picked from its birthplace. Such a statement would not arouse such oohs and aaws if not for the fact that we are standing under a grand canopy of native shade-giving trees.

Large-scale coffee farming in Nicaragua is directly tied to German immigration, spurred on by 19-th century Nicaraguan governments that offered foreign interests free land in exchange for planting coffee trees. Today, much of the coffee produced in the fertile mounds of land surrounding the Jinotega and Matagalpa regions is considered some of the big blue marble’s best specialty java. Employing strict agricultural practices in combination with a damper growing altitude of over 3000 feet, these regions turn out bigger cherries with a more balanced maturation rate. Hence the reason why CECOCAFEN cooperatives have consistently won finalist places at international brewing events such as the Cup of Excellence.

“Please tell me about your profession.” “How is the weather now?” “Why do you not have any children?” With light coming only from the gleam of a well-worn lantern and a sky set ablaze by an almost preternatural canopy of stars, I find myself answering such particularities of my life in Canada and chatting about the ins and outs of coffee farming with Juan Acuña - my host at La Carona. As we engage in small talk to the wee hours of the night in his modest abode house as a hard rain turns its external ambit into a sea of mud, it’s clear that the sweat and blood of this 58 year-old congenial man whose red cap casts a half-moon shadow on his life-hardened face has been poured into a 17-acre farm nestled into Nicaragua’s northern hills. The only thing keeping him busier than producing specialty coffee is his nine children and, as Juan puts forth, “lots of grandkids.”

Fair trade does deliver many financial and environmental benefits to Nicaraguan coffee farmers like Juan, but nonetheless it still falls short in helping families meet all their financial commitments, its avowed goal. With the world fair trade price failing to increase for the last several years and government support gone AWOL, the communities are very much interested in using the extra income from agro eco-tourism and low interest loans provided by CECOCAFEN to maintain and build roads, invest in new environmentally sustainable technologies, to educate their children and invest in health care.

I’m pleased to report that taking part in this positive project is much more than learning about the advantages of fair trade. I am awarded opportunities to participate in the creation of local foods like nacatamales (a scrumptious meat and potato mixture wrapped in a banana leaf), to be entertained by traditional dance and song, play soccer and baseball with rambunctious children and tramp along lush trails to plunging waterfalls and copious mountain views like those found high above La Pita.

“I don’t even know all the animals that are up there,” says Sergio Garcia Diaz, the plump and ardent coordinator of the eco-tourism project for the La Pita community speaking to myself and a delegation of students from Kentucky’s Centre University. Sergio’s harmless unfamiliarity is directed towards the fauna in the sylvan slopes towering behind him.  

Within moments of tramping up these same inclines to the shade-covered coffee crops, we bear witness to such biodiversity as groups of green parrots and other feathered flyers, multi-coloured like rainbow sherbert exchange perches overhead and elusive howler monkeys fill the air with haunting vocals. Their distinctive bellows, especially when echoing in the predawn light, can be quite frightening for newcomers. But today their racket is being drowned out by a man draped in a black rain tarp who is filling his bronzed cheeks with the untarnished air and then setting it free into a conch shell. His purpose is to direct workers towards coffee cherries that deserve picking.  I find this simple form of communication to be utterly fantastic.

“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 manages to collect. Our payoff? 36 Cordoba’s or about 2 American bucks according to Sergio. “Geez, I can’t even buy a latte at Starbucks for that,” sighs a female student in the background.

Back at lower altitudes my host Tomasa, a shy twenty-something farmer with a prominent silver front tooth rustles up a plate of locally grown organic kidney beans, squash, salty cheese (cuajada), and a hot off the griddle corn tortilla. Perfect comestibles after a big day of muddy hiking, picking coffee and joining the local youths under a roaring sun kicking up tawny dust playing the “beautiful game” between two sets of bamboo nets surrounded by virgin forest.

Joined by her husband Vicente and son Selvin, who can’t be pried away from a handheld video game likely donated by a previous guest, the evening quickly passes as the group of us huddle in a small room chitchatting about the country’s complex political history. On a television with surprisingly excellent reception, Van Damme is kicking around some poor gent with another Oscar-worthy performance.  I am relieved that Tomasa is more interested in the pictures I have brought of loved ones back home than Jean Claude’s ripped mid-section. 

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 then, as I move out to the porch to watch the satellites wink across a star-filled sky that I realize opening my wallet to farmers like Vicente and Tomasa who have such an unyielding commitment to family, the environment and producing a quality product by visiting their homes and purchasing their fair trade coffee back home, is money well spent. I retire for the night keeping my fingers crossed that I won’t be awakened by the pre-dawn cacophony of the roosters.