Certified coffee sustains Mexico's farmers, forests

NUEVO PARAISO, Mexico — Miguel Moshan Mendez's troubles have piled up over the past two years.

Like other coffee growers in the impoverished state of Chiapas, he suffered devastating losses when Hurricane Stan passed through 18 months ago, tearing coffee trees from hillsides. He lost half his trees, then borrowed money to get by. Now, he must find extra work as a laborer to pay his debt, which will make it harder to maintain his tiny farm.

"I have always fallen to the moneylender, God, yes," he said, sitting in the office of his coffee-growing cooperative, Comon Yaj Nop Tic, a Tzeltal-language phrase that means, "We're all thinking of it."

What may help, at least a little, is that his co-op is part of a program that helps growers receive higher prices for their beans if they meet certain environmental and other standards.

Earning certification

Moshan Mendez's cooperative sells to Starbucks, which pays higher prices as farmers meet more of its goals, such as producing beans of high quality or using transparent accounting.

Other similar efforts, called certification programs, are run by nongovernmental organizations. To earn certification, farmers must show they are protecting the environment, investing in community projects and treating workers well.

The Fair Trade program, for example, requires buyers of its certified beans to pay above the market price to the farmers. Other certification plans do not guarantee farmers higher prices, but they say many buyers are willing to pay more for coffee if they can offer consumers the assurance that the coffee is produced with a concern for workers and the environment.

In this coffee region, known as Jaltenango, on the eastern slopes of the Sierra Madre, higher prices for certified beans have trickled down to some growers. Certification also has had an environmental impact, persuading farmers to stick with coffee growing instead of clearing trees to begin cattle ranching or corn growing. Coffee trees here traditionally are planted under a canopy of indigenous trees.

The rush to certify coffee is now drawing an expanding list of players, including giant plantations and multinational traders, something that seemed unimaginable a few years ago.

"We have sold the idea to producers that this is life insurance," said Santiago Arguello, who is in charge of certified coffee programs at Agroindustrias Unidas, or AMSA, the Mexican subsidiary of the giant Switzerland-based trader ECOM Agroindustrial Corp. "If we don't learn to work with the little producer, the whole business will disappear."

Such trading companies, the middlemen between growers and the corporations that roast the beans and sell coffee, have not been acclaimed for their social conscience in the past. Now as Arguello, himself a third-generation coffee farmer, sketched plans for his company to sell more certified coffee, he scrolled through a catalog of community projects he is urging importers in Europe and North America to pay for.

Changes in movement

"The good thing is that you see these ideas gaining traction," said Rodney North, a board member at Equal Exchange, an importer in West Bridgewater, Mass., that has been buying coffee under the Fair Trade certification program since 1986.

The most important element of Fair Trade, he said, is that it sets a fixed price for its coffee that holds even if the market collapses.

"Time and again, it's the growers, large or small, that are most at risk," North said. "They take it on the chin when the market drops."

The price for fair-trade organic coffee has long been fixed at $1.41 a pound and later this year it will rise to $1.51 compared with the market price of about $1.08.

But as the certification programs spread, they are drawing large plantations, or fincas, to join, raising worries among small-scale producers who fear they will lose their advantage as the original suppliers.

Rancho Custepec, one of the state's largest coffee plantations, is one of those that have joined a certification plan, a move that is expected to help the environment.

As part of the certification from the Rainforest Alliance for the plantation's coffee, Armando Pohlenz, the grandson of the plantation's founder, said he plans to put about eight square miles of his land in trust for El Triunfo reserve.

The reserve is a refuge for dozens of rare animals, including the quetzal.

Pohlenz said he applied for Rainforest Alliance certification because one of his American buyers said it would help him get a long-term contract and a better price for his coffee.

To get the certification, he also has had to improve workers' safety conditions.

Sixto Bonilla, manager at the Cesmach co-op in Angel Albino Corzo, the area's largest town, said such new competition would force changes among smaller producers.

"If we want to stay in the business, we have to find the way to be more competitive," said Bonilla, whose co-op sells under the Fair Trade label.

Over at the Comon Yaj Noc Pic co-op, the farmers have placed their hope in the Starbucks relationship.

The co-op will receive $1.23 a pound this harvest, said Juan Carlos Cameras, a co-op official. (Starbucks pays $1.43, but AMSA, Starbucks' buying agent in the region, takes a cut.)

With photos in Starbucks' Mexican stores, the cooperative has become a showpiece for the chain's Mexican franchisee, which has pledged $150,000 to the co-op's social projects over the next three years, including a computer center for online high-school classes, dormitories for the students and a sports field.

But for all the benefits of certified coffee, the plans barely have begun to blunt poverty in Chiapas, the legacy of centuries of feudal relationships.

"We should not think that Fair Trade can solve all the problems of inequality here," Bonilla said.