Beyond Fair Trade

by Mark Pendergrast

  Many of the Lisu and Haw spoke Thai, whereas few Akha knew the national language. Aso, the Akha headman, had to serve as their interpreter. When a Thai visitor offered an expensive course (100 baht) to teach the Thai language, only Akha women signed up, donning their headdresses for class in a vain effort to master the language. Instead, they only learned the names of a few common objects. The illiterate Akha, who signed documents with their thumbprints, valued any papers they received, touching them reverentially as if they were sacred objects.

  Among those papers were thirty-year leases for the use of 15 rai (6 acres), for which the Akha had to pay a tax. Akha who had no Thai ID or insufficient funds could not participate, and many Lisu refused to sign up, since they regarded it as their land already.

  That land was becoming denuded of trees. Despite the popular perception that slash-and-burn agriculture was at fault, most of the trees were cut down by legal or illegal Thai loggers. In 1985, a logging company with a concession from the Royal Forestry Department cut down a large swatch of forest along the road between Doi Chang and Doi Lan. “There is an elongated ‘graveyard’ of logs (over 1500 of them) that stretches itself over more than seven kilometres on the path leading to [Doi Lan],” wrote Otome Hutheesing. “Who are the culprits? Certainly not the hill minorities like the Akha and Lisu who live nearby.”

  Long gone were the days that a missionary recalled in 1974, writing about the hill tribes:

  It is difficult now, back in civilization, to evoke the sense of freedom that comes upon a man when he stands on a mountaintop and looks out over tens of thousands of acres of fertile and unexplored land in the valleys below. It is only then that a man knows that, given the wit and will to survive, he need not bow his head to any government, any ideology.

  Most of the remaining agricultural land in Doi Chang was stripped of trees and terraced to grow relentless rows of tomatoes, which often required irrigation. Profits remained high in 1986 and 1987, allowing farmers to buy increasing amounts of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, which they needed as the monoculture attracted more pests. As Duangta Sriwuthiwong, a keen-eyed, skeptical researcher in Doi Chang, observed sarcastically in 1988, the farmers’ “favorite shop” in Chiang Rai sold fertilizer and pesticide, “many kinds of amazing products for saving their crops,” manufactured in Germany, Sri Lanka, or Bangkok. “Where has all the money gone?” she asked rhetorically. After a heavy rain, farmers rushed into their fields to spray pesticides before it was too late. Few protected themselves from the noxious fumes, which made them ill.

  Forced Relocation and the Miracle Crop

  THE THAI GOVERNMENT viewed Doi Chang as a success story in the fight to replace opium with other crops. In March 1986, the head of the DPW unit oversaw a ritual public burning of 3,000 kilograms of poppy seeds and opium smoking pipes and tools, as headmen Beno and Aso looked on, along with many villagers in their traditional dress. In February 1987, there was a repeat performance for Thai prime minister Prem, who brought the Malaysian prime minister to Doi Chang by helicopter for more opium-burning in front of TV cameras.

  A few months later, in September 1987, the Thai police and civilian “Village Defense Volunteers” carried out a series of dawn raids on thirteen hill tribe villages in Chiang Rai Province in order to “repatriate” supposedly illegal immigrants to Burma. American anthropologist Cornelia Kammerer, who had worked among the Akha, wrote in outrage: “Houses and granaries were torched; livestock were stolen or purchased at farm-sale prices; rice nearly ready for harvest was left in the fields; and villagers were forced, sometimes at knifepoint, to hand over their silver ornaments… They were herded onto trucks and dumped at the Burmese border.”

  Some villages were burned. The commander of the Third Army dismissed concerns about the torched homes, saying that they were “only huts.” One devastated Akha man asked in bewilderment:

  Is it really true that we are no longer allowed to establish fields? We are so sad. Now we have been living for years in this country which we have come to love as our home. We have never before had quarrels with the Thai and now we have to leave our villages and emigrate in order not to starve.

  Doi Chang was spared, but most villagers knew friends whose homes had been destroyed. Recalling the opium raid of 1985, they were terrified, posting lookouts on the road to give advanced warning.

  But there was no advanced warning for the collapse of tomato prices in 1988. Other hill tribes, encouraged by the success in Doi Chang, had begun to grow the lucrative crop as well. “The cultivation of tomatoes,” observed Otome Hutheesing in nearby Doi Lan, “had gripped populations from all corners of the area like a disease.” As a result of oversupply, the price collapsed. John McKinnon, a rural development consultant hired to study Doi Chang, documented that in 1988 the “miracle crop” had failed. “Through to the beginning of the 1988 rainy season,” he wrote, “farmers persisted, unaware of the fragility of the market and the fact that they were the captives of a few road-head traders.” The price of tomatoes dropped to 1 baht per kilogram, half of which went to pay for transportation. “The 1988 season has been a disaster,” McKinnon concluded.

  The consultant submitted a scathing report that year. The crop substitute program had been a dismal failure. “Serious indebtedness, declining productivity of the land, and a profound erosion of community morale appear to be the results,” he wrote. The few who continued to grow small fields of rice did so to “reassert their belief that they can grow food for themselves, that they know that rice is the food of their ancestors [and] for certain ritual offerings.” McKinnon wrote that there were “few reasons for optimism. The [former] cropping assembly of opium/rice/maize allowed a more leisurely approach to farming activities, a wider range of domestic food plants were grown, [and] the impact on the environment was much less destructive.”

  The situation at the end of 1988 looked bleak, he concluded. “No farmers have legal rights to the land they work, yet they are caught up in a profound political, economic, and social process which threatens to completely change their way of life. This is no game. It is a fight for survival.”

  That same year, the Thai-German Highland Development Program, claiming victory, moved on to another province.

  Even though the price for tomatoes had dropped precipitously during the 1988 season, the hill tribe farmers of Doi Chang hoped that the next year would be different. They had little choice, since growing opium poppies was no longer an option, and they needed a cash crop. So they grew tomatoes again, along with more cabbages than the previous year. By now, however, the soil was becoming badly depleted and plant pests such as nematodes (worms) were becoming more of a problem, so the farmers had to go further into debt to buy more chemical fertilizer and pesticide. John McKinnon wrote about the appalling outcome:

  The 1989 season was particularly bad. When the crops were ready to harvest, the road became virtually impassable, the price of tomatoes dropped to next to nothing, and the cabbages were so heavily treated with lethal sprays and smelled so bad that truckers from Bangkok refused to load them. Tomatoes and cabbages rotted in the fields. By this time the Thai-German Project had moved on to other activities and new areas, so it did not have to face up to the price the community was paying for going along with adopting the introduced crops. In that season three men died of respiratory arrest, most probably caused by spraying insecticides.

  Two young Lisu women committed suicide because the men they planned to marry could not come up with sufficient bride wealth.

  Coffee: A Better Option?

  AS THE VILLAGERS of Doi Chang faced the last decade of the twentieth century, they were desperate for a way to make a living. Many of the Lisu opted to move. Over the course of the 1990s, they sold out to their Akha neighbors and tried to integrate into Thai society in Chiang Rai, Chiang Mai, or even Bangkok. Doi Chang gradually became a predominantly Akha village. The farmers who remained, whether Lisu or Akha, hoped that coffee might be the crop that would at least prevent starvati
on.

  Lisu headman Beno, noted for his shiny bald pate, was one of those who chose to remain in Doi Chang. Out of curiosity, he had brought the first coffee plants—about a thousand seedlings from the Lahu village of Hue Mat San—to Doi Chang back in 1977, but after the initial encouraging harvest a few years later, they had not done well. The price declined and many trees succumbed to disease. In 1984, the Thai-German project gave 7,000 coffee seedlings to sixteen Doi Chang farmers—eight Akha and eight Lisu—who planted them on a total of seven experimental acres. They were of the arabica species, superior to the robusta that grew at lower elevations, but the Caturra and Catuai seedlings they planted were subject to coffee leaf rust, a fungus with the fierce Latin name, Hemileia vastatrix, and only 4,958 of the trees survived.

  In 1986, the Thai-Germans gave nineteen farmers another 7,400 seedlings, still arabica, but this time they were of the Catimor variety, which was more resistant to coffee leaf rust. Most of these trees survived (6,530 of them), offering more hope for coffee’s success in the village, so in 1987 another thirty farmers were given seedlings. The farmers weren’t particularly interested in coffee, but they received an ID card identifying them as a member of the coffee growers’ group, and for those who had no Thai citizenship cards or rights, the symbolic weight of any kind of official identification was great.

  It takes three or four years for seedlings to grow into mature, bearing coffee trees. The first small harvest, then, would have arrived in 1987. Two years later, in July 1989, the International Coffee Agreement (ICA) expired, due to discord between Brazil and the United States and widespread discontent with the global quota system. Despite an avowed belief in free trade, the Americans had supported price-support quotas because of Cold War fears that poverty-stricken coffee farmers would turn Communist. With the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the United States no longer cared. When the ICA fell apart, coffee-growing countries dumped their stockpiled beans onto the world market, driving prices on the C-market down from $1.15 to 65 cents a pound or lower.

  The Akha and Lisu of Doi Chang had no idea why coffee prices suddenly bottomed out, but they knew they could only sell their beans in Chiang Mai for 40 or 50 baht for years to come. Nonetheless, by the time their Catimor trees were producing ripe red coffee cherries in 1990, coffee had become the last best hope for some kind of reliable, semi-profitable crop.

  Unfortunately, bringing coffee to market wasn’t as simple as it was for tomatoes or cabbages. You couldn’t just pick it, wash it, bag it, and throw it on a truck. Coffee is ripe when the green berry turns a rich wine red (or in some varieties, yellow). It looks a bit like a cranberry or cherry, though it is more oval-shaped. Growers can test a coffee cherry by squeezing it between thumb and forefinger. If the seed squirts out easily, it is ripe. What is left in the hand—the red skin, along with a bit of flesh—is called the pulp. What squishes out is a gummy mucilage sticking to the parchment, a thick protective layer somewhat similar to the skin on peanuts. And like peanuts, coffee seeds usually grow in facing pairs. Inside the parchment are the seeds (somewhat inaccurately called coffee beans), which are covered by a diaphanous silver skin.

  One problem with coffee is that the cherries do not ripen all at once. If you strip them all off simultaneously, as many Doi Chang farmers did in the 1990s, you get a combination of ripe and green beans, which is just one of many ways to ruin the eventual taste in the cup.

  As agronomist Jacques Op de Laak, who worked at a coffee research station in Chiang Mai, observed in 1992: “Being a complicated crop in terms of technology, management, investment and delayed returns, coffee put farmers’ interest, patience, reliance, and adaptability to the test.” He added, “Adequate knowledge and experience must be built up at all stages of the production cycle, i.e., planting, fertilization, field management, disease and pest control, weeding, harvesting, and processing.”

  Years later, Op de Laak wrote more candidly:

  I was not really optimistic about highland coffee cultivation in the northern Thai hills when I finished my assignment at the Highland Coffee Research and Development Centre at Chiang Mai University in 1992. Arabica coffee after all was virtually exclusively grown by hill tribe farmers who were at that time sort of spoon-fed (with seed, loans and training and extension services) by numerous Highland Development Programmes financed by various overseas donors. At that time these HDP’s were gradually winding up their involvement and left the farmers at the mercy of often unscrupulous traders and buyers from the lowlands.

  The Thai-German managers probably gave the farmers some instructions about how to harvest and process the coffee, but by the time of the first serious harvests, the project advisors had departed. The Wawi Highland Agricultural Station was still there, but it was further up the mountain, and though the Thai agronomists experimented with coffee, little of what they discovered or advised filtered down to the growers below.

  Farmers consequently did what made the most sense to them, which was to use the oldest traditional method of removing the bean, known as the dry or natural method. Both the ripe and unripe cherries, along with buds, twigs, and leaves, were stripped from the branches, then spread to dry, either on a dirt patio or up on the thatched or corrugated metal roof of a house. Unless they were turned several times a day, the beans were likely to ferment, and if it rained and they were not covered, that likelihood became a certainty. Fermentation resulted in unpleasant or “off” tastes. The beans might also lie on the ground for so long that they would develop mold or absorb other unpleasant earthy tastes—iodine-like and malodorous.

  When the skins were shriveled, hard, and nearly black, the Akha farmers’ wives threw them in their rice-pounders, which could be heard every morning thudding throughout the village to remove husk from stored rice. These pounders were made from long levered poles that could be lifted by a foot treadle and then let fall so that a wooden mortar slammed heavily into a hollow log. The process removed the dried skin and mucilage from the coffee beans, which, bruised, fermented, and still covered in parchment, were ready to sell to a trader down in the lowlands. It never occurred to the Akha to roast and brew their coffee—they drank tea.

  The truck ride down the rutted dirt road to get to Chiang Rai took four hours during the dry season, and more when it rained, and then it was at least another three hours to drive south to Chiang Mai, where the coffee traders were preparing to go home in the late afternoon. They took one look at the dusty, bedraggled Akha farmers and knew that these hill tribe rubes were riper for the picking than their coffee. They offered miserable prices, hardly paying the cost of the gas to get there and back.

  But what choice did the farmers have? They weren’t going to drive back up the mountain with their load. So they sold for whatever they could get and went home, arriving exhausted and hungry long after dark. It is little wonder that most coffee farmers eventually cut their coffee trees down in frustrated rage.

  End of an Era

  BY THE LATE 1990s, the traditional life of the Akha was noticeably eroding, as Deborah Tooker noted when she made a return visit to Doi Chang in December 1997. Although there was still no electricity (that would arrive soon afterwards), VCRs (run by batteries or generators) had introduced the villagers to Thai culture and modern mass-produced goods. The village, including the agriculture station up the hill, had grown to hold about 135 households, with well over a thousand people. “More and more land was purchased for a cash price or even rented for cash on a monthly basis,” Tooker observed, “creating a division between the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’… A new wealth-based ranking system, part of a more global capitalist system, was developing.”

  Many Akha now worked as wage laborers for the agricultural station, punching a time clock and maintaining a seven-day week rather than the traditional twelve-day cycle and more natural flow of activity. Mass-produced goods, including surplus Western-style clothing, were replacing homespun cotton and elegant appliqué and embroidery. Many homes were built with lumber
, cement block, and tin roofs rather than bamboo and thatch. Women now donned their silver-laden headdresses only for special occasions. People maintained a small token rice field only so that they could perform old rituals, and some homes were built with separate kitchens, keeping a symbolic cooking area near the sleeping mats, although no meals were prepared there anymore.

  Tooker also found evidence of more addiction, crime, and violence. She met an Akha heroin addict, the younger brother of the pima, who looked terrible, emaciated, and desperate. Two days later, he was dead, shot by Lisu from whom he had stolen in order to pay for his drugs. She heard about Akha suicides, inconceivable in the traditional past. Both men and women had intentionally consumed insecticide to end their lives. The one positive change of this modernity movement was the 1998 Akha decision to stop killing twins and children with missing or extra fingers or toes at birth.

  Increasingly, tourists found their way up the mountain to visit Doi Chang, and to appeal to them, some Akha traditions were modified to be performed outside their usual time. The Swing Ceremony and children’s top-spinning games, for instance, were put on display for paying tourists. “A stage was constructed for the performance of Akha dances and songs and an Akha rock band,” Tooker noted.