Beyond Fair Trade

by Mark Pendergrast

  His other major focus was on calling for a ceasefire in the Lisu-Akha conflict in Doi Chang. “I tried to be a mediator, asking people to come and talk reasonably together,” Adel said. His efforts to promote reconciliation were only partially successful, since the tension had been simmering for two decades. It was hard to build trust, but he had made a start.

  One challenge proved to be too much, though. Adel could not see a way to raise the standard of living for the Akha or Lisu, and he disliked feeling that he was expected to achieve the impossible. He resigned in 1999, after seventeen months as headman. A moderate, conciliatory Lisu named Suchat replaced him for three years, but all the subsequent headmen in Doi Chang were Akha.

  The situation in Doi Chang remained dire. The mountainside around the village was nearly barren of trees, with the exception of some 200 acres of coffee shrubs, most of which had regrown after being cut down and abandoned. Otherwise, only scraggly patches of second-growth trees, along with a few peach, apricot, and macadamia nut trees, grew here and there between the tomato and cabbage fields. Village farmers continued to spend money on chemical fertilizers and pesticides that sickened them when they inhaled the fumes. And prices continued to fluctuate unpredictably. Many Akha worked for just over a dollar a day at the agricultural research station up the mountain, but they brought back little useful information to the farmers in the village.

  Most of the Lisu families had fled down the mountain, looking for better-paying jobs and trying to assimilate with the lowland Thai. Beno, now retired, remained in Doi Chang, but his daughter, Chome, worked for IMPECT, a hill tribe development agency in Chiang Rai. Beno commented with apparent pragmatism that in thirty years, the Lisu would all be Thai.

  As anthropologist Deborah Tooker concluded, “A hill swidden subsistence rice economy and a semi-autonomous local political system, on which a comprehensive form of Akha identity is based,… is no longer viable… Incorporation into the larger national and global scene brings with it both losses, reflected in Akha nostalgia for older forms of collective identity… and gains, reflected in Akha acceptance of, and even strategizing within, the new regime.” Adel was more than interested in strategizing within the new parameters, but he could not figure out how to carve out a better life for his people.

  With help from Akha relatives in the Yunnan Province of China, Adel began an import-export business, selling hill tribe chicken parts (livers, lungs, and guts) and eels to the Chinese and bringing back potatoes to sell in Thailand. While engaged in this enterprise, he discovered that Chinese coffee beans were being imported into Thailand. That’s strange, he thought. We grow coffee in Doi Chang. Why can’t we sell our own coffee?

  Around that time, in the fall of 2001, Adel’s fifteen-year-old niece Apa asked her father, Leehu, for advice on a school project. She was attending a Christian high school in Chiang Rai, and her assignment was to bring something from her hometown to sell at a school event. Leehu, who was helping his father, Piko, with his frustrating coffee sales, said that he could have some of their coffee roasted in Chiang Mai and Apa could take that. Apa bought an automatic brewer from the Big C store in Chiang Rai and brewed coffee at the school fair, selling it for 20 baht (about 65 cents) per cup. The coffee was a hit. She sold 45 cups and gave the 900 baht (about $30) to her father.

  Leehu was astonished. His teenage daughter had made more profit from the roasted, brewed coffee than he made selling 20 kilos of green beans in Chiang Mai, and she still had a few bags left over. When he told his younger brother Adel about it, Adel decided that coffee might be the solution to the chronic village poverty after all. If city people were crazy enough to pay that much money for a cup of coffee, why not take advantage of it? But he didn’t know how to go about it.

  Enter Wicha

  ADEL THOUGHT OF Uncle Wicha. If anyone would know what to do, it would be Wicha. Wicha Promyong was not really Adel’s uncle, but the peripatetic Thai man had roamed throughout the mountains for decades, since Adel was a little boy. Wicha had slept in Piko’s house sometimes, sharing meals, laughing, singing, and telling stories of other villages he had visited. Wicha had traveled widely, even to Europe. He spoke Akha, Lisu, and Thai, as well as English and a smattering of French, German, and Mandarin. Such a man of the world might be able to give good advice, might be able to find a way for the Akha of Doi Chang to break out of their poverty with coffee. So late in 2001, Adel ventured down the mountain to see Wicha. His timing was fortuitous. Wicha, then around fifty, was pondering his next big project. He was doing well enough with what he called his antiques store, selling traditional hill tribe goods, secondhand clothing, and army surplus uniforms from both the US Army and the Viet Cong. But he was growing bored.

  Through his wanderings, Wicha had come to love the hill tribes and their way of life. He was particularly fond of the Akha, with their deep sense of their culture and place in the cosmos. He knew that unwanted change had been thrust on them. He had seen it for himself, had despaired over the forced relocations, the violence, the drug addiction and prostitution. He listened with sympathy and attention as Adel described his quandary and asked for advice.

  “Tomorrow I will come up the mountain,” Wicha told Adel. “I will visit with your father, my old friend Piko, and I’ll have a look around. Maybe we can figure something out. I can’t be sure of anything, but I will try.” Adel rose to leave, expressing his gratitude even as he towered over the smaller man. Wicha stood barely over 5 feet and looked so skinny that the wind might blow him away. His hair was close-shaven, but he sported a scraggly beard and mustache and wore long braids down his back and an earring in one ear. Yet he walked and talked with the self-assurance of a much larger man.

  The next day Wicha, true to his word, drove for several hours up the rutted dirt road to the village, with its scruffy children, chickens, and pigs dodging out of the way. He took tea at Piko’s home, greeting his old friend and his wife, Bu Chu, and Piko’s mother. Then, accompanied by Adel, Wicha walked around the village. It was essentially as he remembered it—small family compounds with vegetable gardens between them—but there were fewer pole, bamboo, and thatch-covered huts and more structures that looked like the poorest homes down in the city. Here, however, the corrugated metal roofs atop ramshackle boards were signs of relative wealth.

  They got in Wicha’s truck and drove up toward the ridge to the northeast along the rutted dirt road, passing fields of tomatoes and cabbage. Wicha shook his head as he saw a farmer spraying. “I hate this kind of crop,” he said, gesturing at the man in the field as they bounced and swayed past. “They cut down all the trees, and they use all those chemicals.” They crested the hill, coming down into a higher valley, going toward the satellite village of Ban Mai (which means “new village”), where many of the Chinese Haw and Akha had settled. Here in the high valley Wicha saw spindly coffee trees, with their glossy green leaves and berries.

  “This is where my father still tends his coffee trees,” Adel said. “But I don’t know why he bothers. There isn’t much money in it. Still, as I told you, Apa sold her brewed coffee for a lot of money. Maybe we can figure out how to do that.” Wicha stopped the truck. He loved all kinds of shrubs and trees, and he wasn’t familiar with coffee. As Adel explained how the Thai-German project had given them the trees and how they had been frustrated by the subsequent low coffee prices, they walked through the fields. Wicha touched the leaves, picked a few of the ripe red berries, and kicked at the earth with his shoe.

  “You know,” he said, “coffee has become very popular in Bangkok. They have coffeehouses where people pay a lot for just one cup, and they sit and talk over it, as we do with tea. Even in Chiang Rai some tourists ask where they can find good coffee. Maybe Apa’s experience at the school fair wasn’t so unusual. Perhaps there is something we could do to get a better price. Let me look into it.”

  Leehu gave Wicha the rest of the roasted coffee that Apa had not brewed. Wicha didn’t like coffee—he preferred tea—but the next day, ba
ck in the lowlands, he took the coffee to a dealer in Chiang Mai, who brewed it and declared that it was quite good, despite containing some over-fermented, bug-eaten, and broken beans. Wicha had his new project. He set out to find out how to grow, process, and brew the best coffee.

  He went to Chiang Mai University, which was noted for its strong agricultural program. When he walked into offices unannounced and explained that he wanted to talk to a coffee expert about how to help the Akha, the secretaries politely told him to take a seat. Then they disappeared and came back, shaking their heads. Sorry, the professor is too busy. Sorry, the professor is in class. Sorry, you have to make an appointment.

  “Excuse me,” Wicha said, when a distinguished-looking man in a tweed jacket and wearing a tie strode by in yet another office. “Excuse me, sir, but I am trying to help the Akha…” The man recoiled from Wicha, who was dressed in his customary informal clothing—baggy pants, an unbuttoned shirt over a black t-shirt, a gold chain around his neck—and backed quickly out of the room. “I’m sorry. You will have to make an appointment. I have no time to talk to any Akha today.”

  So that’s it, Wicha thought. They think I am Akha. No one wants to waste time on the Akha. He turned to go, when a woman who had just walked into the office and overheard the conversation asked, “Can I help you? I have to go soon, but I could spare a few minutes.”

  The woman was Patchanee Suwanwisolkit, an agronomist who would go on to write two books about coffee cultivation. She invited Wicha into her office and listened patiently as he explained the situation. “Yes,” the agronomist said, “I’ve actually been up to Doi Chang before, years ago, when I was a graduate student. I remember how muddy the road was and how difficult it was to get up there, and how frightened I was by the stories about violence and bandits.” Wicha assured her that he would pick her up in Chiang Rai to drive her up the mountain and that she would be perfectly safe with him.

  There was another problem. “Doi Chang is out of my jurisdiction. I am only supposed to be giving agricultural extension advice in Chiang Mai Province. But if I were to go there on my own time, on a weekend, I suppose no one could object. And if you have 50 baht, I could sell you this basic book about coffee cultivation to start your education,” she said, grabbing a book off her shelf.

  A Lifetime’s Preparation

  ALTHOUGH WICHA PROMYONG’S adventurous life may have seemed somewhat random up to that point, it might be seen, in retrospect, as perfect preparation for the role he was to play in helping the Akha of Doi Chang become world-renowned for their coffee. It is unclear exactly when he was born. His birth certificate said 1955, but he later said that it was late by as much as five years. He was probably born in the early 1950s, the seventh of ten children of Cham and Sudnit Promyong. He enjoyed keeping his age a bit of a mystery, always joking that he was twenty-nine when he was obviously well beyond that milestone.

  His father, Cham, was born in southern Thailand in 1901, the son of a relatively wealthy Muslim landowner, though Wicha said that his grandfather wasn’t rich but smart, claiming land when it cost a pittance, and that the family was land-rich but not so flush with cash. The family’s original surname was Mustafa, an Arabic name, but his grandfather had changed it to Promyong, a Thai name, in order to assimilate better.

  Wicha’s father had studied Islam in Egypt, then science and law in Europe. He was still in Europe on June 24, 1932, when a revolution ended the absolute monarchy that had ruled Siam, as it was still called, for 700 years. The current lineage, the House of Chakri, had begun in 1782 with Rama I, a military leader who declared himself the monarch, established Bangkok as the capital, and fathered forty-two children. Rama VII was ruling at the time of the 1932 revolt.

  The revolution was led by rising young middle-class leaders, both civilians and military men, who had, like Cham Promyong, been educated in Europe. Cham rushed back to Siam to support the revolution, becoming a leader of young Muslims who believed in modernity and democratic change.

  Rama VII, a moderate who had tried in vain to institute a constitution, only to be blocked by the powerful traditional princes, defused the potentially violent situation by agreeing to the new constitution that stripped him of most power other than his title. The monarchy subsequently had some of its power restored, but Rama VII abdicated in 1935. His successor was his nephew Rama VIII, a nine-year-old boy attending school in Switzerland. He remained there, with Thai-based regents ruling in his stead, until after World War II.

  The handsome young king, who held a law degree, was an instant hit among his subjects, and as the chief representative of the minority Muslims in Siam, Cham Promyong was one of his advisors. Tragically, Rama VIII died in 1946. His brother, Rama IX—more commonly referred to as King Bhumibol—succeeded him to the throne, where he would remain for an unprecedented length of time. It was King Bhumibol who championed the cause of the hill tribes and began the Royal Project to help them.

  Wicha was born in the Phra Pradaeng district just south of Bangkok, when his father was in his fifties. His mother, Sudjit, was considerably younger. Wicha wasn’t sure of his own birth date, but he knew that he entered the world on a moonlit night and that his brother ran to call the old midwife in the village. “My father owned 5 or 6 acres there. He had land here and there around Thailand, which he inherited from his father. Promyong is a big name in Thailand, and people think we are very rich, but that isn’t true. My father was a very good man—everyone loved him.” Cham Promyong spoke multiple languages and was clever at anything he set his mind to learn, according to his son. He was a generous man, who “gave away all” to anyone who was in need.

  Wicha grew up worshiping his father, but mostly from afar, because as the head of the Thai Muslims, Cham was rarely home. Wicha’s mother was the steady rock on which he built his young life. “My mother raised ten children, virtually alone. She was a tough woman,” he said. “She wasn’t scared of anything.”

  Wicha, who did not enjoy school, quit when he was fifteen and sold ice cream with a friend to make some money. Despite this, he won a scholarship from the University of Pakistan, but only briefly attended classes. “I couldn’t sit still like that for very long,” he recalled. After a few months, he ran away. He stayed for a while in the Peshawar district of northern Pakistan, now infamous as a Taliban stronghold, but at that time, it was simply a wild area where nomads and other itinerants lived. Peshawar was a fascinating, ancient multiethnic city. Then he hitchhiked across the border to Afghanistan and ended up in Kabul for several months. “I lived cheap cheap,” Wicha recalled. “I would stay in a place that charged five rupees a night, but I would offer to help to sweep or wash dishes, and I usually could stay for free, or they even paid me.” He would befriend older men who worked at the inns, and they gave him better food. Meeting other travelers—Japanese, Australians, Germans, American hippies—Wicha learned to play the guitar and harmonica from street musicians, and he began to smoke hashish with them to get high while he played. He learned rudimentary English and sang Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and other folk or protest tunes.

  Then it was on to Iran, but only for a short time. In Tehran, he was walking one morning with a group of Americans and Europeans when some Iranian boys ran up and began harassing some of the women, grabbing at their breasts. “It happened just right in front of me,” Wicha recalled, “so I fought with them to stop them.” After six days in an Iranian prison, he was released and hopped a mini-bus going to Turkey. He still had about $60 he had saved from his days in Kabul. He continued to wander, passing through Turkey, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia.

  In Austria he met Terry O’Sullivan, a Brit who said he knew a way to sneak into West Germany, where border guards were strict about keeping vagrants out. O’Sullivan planned to cross over by walking through the Black Forest. They got lost in freezing temperatures. “I didn’t know what to eat. It wasn’t like the jungle in Thailand. There were just tall pine trees. We were starving. The bread in my rucksack saved our lives.” Maddeningly, he
couldn’t open the can of sardines he had brought. They kept walking west, following the sun, and finally they saw smoke rising into the sky from a fire. A rural farmer gave them hot soup and let them rest a while, then showed them the highway, where they walked and hitchhiked to Chiemsee, the island where mad King Ludwig had erected a huge unfinished castle.

  For a month, he and Terry O’Sullivan toured Germany together. “Terry had worked in South Africa and had money. I only had sixteen dollars left, so he paid for everything.” Then O’Sullivan left for England. Wicha stayed in Germany, sleeping in parks and washing in underground bathrooms for a while. He eventually found work in Chinese restaurants, where he could eat and sleep in a corner in return for washing dishes and cleaning bathrooms. In Hanover, he met some musician friends, joined a band, and found steady work in a restaurant.

  Then, in October 1973, a student revolution broke out in Thailand, protesting against the military junta and demanding a new constitution guaranteeing democracy. A crowd of 400,000 protestors gathered, and the regime agreed to free political prisoners and promised to adopt a new constitution the following year. Nonetheless, police subsequently attacked students, who retaliated with vandalism. Tanks, helicopters, and soldiers were brought in, and over one hundred students were killed. Finally, King Bhumibol intervened and announced that the military government had resigned.

  With the student rebellion making international news, Wicha flew back to Bangkok. He stayed for four months, joining protest songwriter Surachai Jantimatorn and his rock band. It was a time of incredible energy, excitement, chaos, and optimism. Students continued to call for strikes and sit-ins to protest everything from Thailand’s trade imbalance with Japan to the CIA’s role in funding the Thai military. But nothing had really changed, even under the supposedly “democratic” regime. Corruption and violence continued. The right wing and military surged back to power in 1976, with increased assassinations of student leaders and other protestors. Surachai Jantimatorn and his fellow musicians, known as Caravan, fled Bangkok, hiding out in rural areas. They were able to return from exile only after amnesty was declared in 1979.