Beyond Fair Trade

by Mark Pendergrast

  After Wicha’s brief but intense four months in Thailand, he left again, this time flying to England, where he spent the next four years doing whatever was needed to survive. One day a young Scottish woman named Brenda Douglas came to a Chinese restaurant to buy chicken. She was intrigued by the young Thai man who served her. They began to see one another and fell in love. By this time, Wicha was tired of the British weather and was homesick. He and Brenda flew back to Thailand in 1977, where they were married. The following year, their daughter, Chada, was born.

  Wicha was distraught when he went back to see his father’s old home. What used to be a “garden plantation” was now covered with smoke-belching factories. The water was filthy. “All my plants had died from the pollution.” And his mother had sold his beloved Harley-Davidson motorcycle.

  He bought a small farm on the outskirts of Bangkok, but he wasn’t happy. “I didn’t know what I was doing. My way of life was to struggle. I couldn’t settle down.” He left Brenda and his daughter in Bangkok and began to travel restlessly again. He preferred the city of Chiang Mai, farther north, which was far less crowded and polluted, so the family moved to a rental house there with two-year-old Chada.

  Wicha began to roam through the hills, getting to know the hill tribes, buying “antiques”—old opium scales, jewelry, animal traps, weapons, homespun embroidered clothing—from them to resell in a store he opened in Chiang Mai. He opened a factory to make rustic furniture from twisted tree limbs and other “found” wood. “It seemed like I started a new business every day,” Wicha remembered.

  Although he was a good businessman and enjoyed the money he made, Wicha was always generous and tried to help the downtrodden. When he happened to meet an ex-convict who was down on his luck, for instance, he hired him to work in his furniture factory, and that led to many other former prisoners seeking work there.

  After seven years in Thailand, Brenda had had enough. Wicha was rarely home, she worried that Chada would not receive an adequate education in Thailand, and she missed her family. In 1984 she left Wicha, without rancor, to return to Scotland.

  Free to roam at will in northern Thailand, Wicha continued to create new enterprises, including a pig farm, despite the Muslim prohibition against pork. “At that time,” he said, “I knew a lot about the northern mountains, the jungle here and there. No one else knew the jungle the way I did. So I worked for many people as an advisor.”

  Another project involved research on stevia, a plant that showed promise as a natural low-calorie alternative to sugar. Wicha explained, “They tried to grow stevia in Thailand, starting in 1982,” which is when he was hired. This was one of the crop replacement schemes supported by the Thai military in villages that supposedly held communist sympathizers. Wicha, who loved growing things, became an expert on the plant. “Once I study something, I go deep into it,” he said. He worked nearly full-time on the stevia project for seven years and part-time for another four years.

  Stevia, which is native to subtropical and tropical regions in the western hemisphere, is part of the sunflower family. The leaves of the stevia plant are intensely sweet, but most stevia products produce a bitter, licorice-like aftertaste. Wicha claimed that Thailand produced a superior strain, but it could not compete with cheaper stevia products from China, Brazil, the Philippines, and elsewhere.

  During his stevia research, Wicha met Nuch, a Thai secretary at the stevia factory. They were married in 1984, though he warned her from the outset that he was a traveling man, unlikely to stick around for any length of time. He stayed home long enough, however, to father four children—Chanoot, a boy, born in 1986, two daughters, Nootcha (1988) and Picha (1990), and another son, Pichai (1995). They all had nicknames starting with K—in descending order, Khem, Kwan, Kern, and Koon.

  Chiang Mai was turning into too much of a big city for Wicha’s taste, so in the late 1980s, he moved his growing family farther north to the smaller, more intimate city of Chiang Rai, where he reopened his antiques store. Here he was closer to many of the hill tribes. He continued to make forays up into villages in the mountains, including Doi Chang, and he hired a crew of buyers to work for him throughout the mountains of Thailand, Laos, and Burma. His store was named one of the top five antique shops in the world.

  Not all of his ventures succeeded. In Chiang Rai, he opened a large restaurant with an adjacent retail market where members of hill tribes—mostly Akha, Lisu, and Hmong—demonstrated how to make traditional handicrafts and silversmithing. The business provided important income for the impoverished tribes. “He would throw himself into everything he did,” his daughter Kwan remembered, “whether it was antiques, plants, food, or building design.” Her father sometimes frustrated her with his generosity. “I was a selfish kid, and I would try to stop him from giving everything away.”

  Her parents would help anyone with a problem. “When I was very young,” Kwan recalled, “the antiques store was in the middle of town, and a poor boy from the south of Thailand came by. Mom fried him an egg and some chicken, so he came by every day, and he told them he was an orphan. Years later, when we opened our first coffeeshop, this scruffy hippy guy, with lots of beads, said hello and asked if my parents remembered him. He was that boy. And it wasn’t just him—there were many others like him. My parents helped so many.”

  But the restaurant and hill tribe market went bankrupt in 1992, after demonstrations in Bangkok against the military regime led to massacres and riots. Tourism, on which Wicha’s businesses relied, dried up, and business for his antiques shop slowed down as well. Fortunately, King Bhumibol intervened, which led to new elections, and a civil war was averted. But for much of the next ten years, Wicha struggled financially.

  Kwan, who was a young child when the restaurant went under, remembered the following ten years fondly. “Before the bankruptcy, he was so busy. I remember the restaurant and the hill tribe activities, about twenty minutes from town, out in the country, and his antiques store. He never felt stretched, he liked to do many things. He moved faster than anyone. He walked ten steps for every one of ours, and he was always thinking.”

  With fewer enterprises, he slowed down a bit and was around more, though he sometimes traveled to Nan Province to tend to his teak plantation there. He also became obsessed with planting rare tropical trees on his Chiang Rai property. “In my primary school years, and the first two high school years, Dad wasn’t so busy,” Kwan recalled. “We lived in a house by the Mekong River, where for us kids Dad built what we called our Tarzan House, a tree house with a sliding board.” Together they often went to their small farm twenty minutes away to pick ripe red lychee fruits, which Kwan sold out of the back of their truck. “Many people Dad had helped in the past came to the house to give us money and food, though we never felt we wanted for money, ever in our lives. We grew vegetables, and people who had cows or chickens gave us meat.”

  Kwan loved the times when rock musician Surachai Jantimatorn, whom she called Uncle Nga, came to visit Wicha, still one of his best friends. “About fifty musicians would come. They set up tents, and some slept in the Tarzan House. Dad would play harmonica, guitar, and flute.”

  Wicha eventually bounced back. “I was born to make money,” he explained. He also spent his bahts easily, giving to people in need, as his father had done before him. He was dismayed by the treatment of the hill tribes and appalled at the massacres, forced village relocations, burned homes, and sexual slavery. He once led a raid on a brothel in order to free twelve-year-old girls.

  Coffee Renaissance

  THUS, BY THE TIME Adel came down the mountain from Doi Chang to ask for help in 2001, Wicha had already led an incredible life. He knew the jungle, knew the hill tribes and their plight, knew how to research new crops—and knew how to make money. He also loved a challenge.

  Now he found himself sitting around a fire in a small hut in Doi Chang, talking late into the night with a group of desperate Akha and Patchanee Suwanwisolkit, the agronomist from Chiang Mai Un
iversity. There was no electricity in the hut, which sat on one rai (a little over a third of an acre) that the Akha had purchased for 50,000 baht (less than $2,000) on the road to the village, just as it crested a hill and was descending into the small valley where most of the houses in Doi Chang were located.

  The agronomist, who had been extremely nervous about coming to this notoriously drug-ridden, violent, remote village, forgot all her apprehensions as she saw the eager, receptive faces turned toward her. She talked about how to prepare seeds for new trees—choose ripe coffee cherries from the healthiest trees that bore the most fruit, then strip the skin off and dry them in the shade, not the sun. “Then you can plant them right away, or they will keep up to three months,” she explained in Thai. She waited while Wicha translated her words into Akha.

  “Before planting, soak the seeds in water overnight. Plant them in sand mixed with dirt. It takes six weeks for them to sprout. They will send out two butterfly wings at first—two leaves.” At that point, she explained, they had to transfer the seedlings to individual pots filled with rich soil. “You can’t expose them to full sun—they need about 50 percent exposure—so put black semi-transparent screening over the plants. Leave them to grow for six to eight months. A month before you’re ready to set them out in a field, prepare the soil, exposing it to the sun to bake out impurities. At the same time, take the black screening off the seedlings so that they begin to adjust to the sun.”

  Adel’s older brother Leehu, younger brother Ayu and brother-in-law Akong were also present. As Patchanee explained each process, from seedling to mature, producing tree, Wicha and the others asked questions. Wicha scribbled notes, but the Akha, with no written language, simply took it all in. With their astonishing memories, they had no trouble recalling the details later.

  Charmed by Wicha and the receptive, hospitable Akha farmers, Patchanee agreed to help them, returning every weekend on her own time. The timing couldn’t have been worse in terms of the world market. Because Vietnam had begun to flood the world with poor-quality robusta coffee beans, the price for coffee on the C-market in New York had dropped precipitously. The years 2001–2003 were the nadir of what came to be known as the Coffee Crisis. The good news for the Akha was that they were already in crisis, and the low prices did not discourage them.

  Over the next three years, with advice and hard work, the Akha began to grow more coffee, and this time they knew better what they were doing. Nonetheless, they faced a steep learning curve and many unforeseen problems.

  CHAPTER 4

  Doi Chaang Coffee

  DURING THE FIRST YEAR of his coffee tutelage, Wicha read everything about coffee he could find, starting with the book Patchanee loaned him. He found that the material written in Thai was contradictory, ill-informed, and poorly translated from English, German, or other languages. So he read most of the material in English. “It was very hard for me and took a long time, but I did it,” he said. Gradually, he learned about coffee—its history, cultivation, economics, and market. True to form, he immersed himself in his topic.

  Coffee was first identified as a medicinal plant that grew wild on the mountainsides of Ethiopia, but no one knows exactly when or by whom. Of the various legends, the most appealing involves dancing goats. An Ethiopian goatherd named Kaldi allegedly noticed that his goats were behaving quite strangely, running about, butting one another, dancing on their hind legs, and bleating excitedly. The goats were chewing the glossy green leaves and red berries of a tree. Kaldi tried some of the berries himself. The fruit was mildly sweet, and the seeds that popped out were covered with a thick, tasty mucilage. Finally, he chewed the seeds themselves, but they were too hard, so he spit them out, then popped another berry in his mouth. Soon, according to legend, Kaldi was frisking with his goats. Poetry and song spilled out of him. He felt that he would never be tired or grouchy again.

  There may be some truth to the story, since goats will eat almost anything and they do wander at will in the Ethiopian mountains. At any rate, coffee became an integral part of Ethiopian culture. By the time Rhazes, an Arabian physician, first mentioned coffee in print in the tenth century, the trees probably had been deliberately cultivated for hundreds of years. It is likely that, as in the legend, the coffee cherries and leaves were initially chewed, but the Ethiopians then learned to brew the leaves and berries with boiled water as a weak tea. They ground the beans and mixed them with animal fat for a quick energy snack. They made wine out of the fermented pulp and made a sweet beverage, kisher, out of the lightly roasted husks of the coffee cherry.

  Finally, probably in the fifteenth century, someone roasted the beans. When roasted, they blew up to twice their size and turned brown, blackening if roasted too long. The Ethiopians ground these aromatic roasted beans and put them in hot water for a few minutes to make an infusion. Coffee as we know it had arrived.

  Once the Ethiopians discovered coffee, it was only a matter of time before the drink spread through trade with the Arabs across the narrow band of the Red Sea. The Arab Sufi monks adopted coffee as a drink that would allow them to stay awake for midnight prayers more easily. Initially regarded as a medicine or religious aid, it soon slipped into everyday use. Wealthy people had a coffee room in their homes, reserved for social imbibing. Coffeehouses, known as kaveh kanes, then sprang up, allowing the less wealthy to indulge. By the end of the fifteenth century, Muslim pilgrims had introduced coffee throughout the Islamic world in Persia, Egypt, Turkey, and North Africa, making it a lucrative trade item.

  As the drink grew in popularity throughout the sixteenth century, it also gained its reputation as a troublemaking brew. Various rulers decided that people were having too much fun in the coffeehouses. When Khair-Beg, the young governor of Mecca, discovered that satirical verses about him were emanating from the coffeehouses, he determined that coffee, like wine, must be outlawed by the Koran, and he persuaded his religious, legal, and medical advisors to agree. Thus, in 1511 the coffeehouses of Mecca were closed. The ban didn’t last long.

  Coffee drinking prevailed partly because of its addictive nature, but also because coffee provided an intellectual stimulant, a pleasant way to feel increased energy without any apparent ill effects. Coffeehouses allowed people to get together for conversation, entertainment, and business, inspiring agreements, poetry, and irreverence in equal measure. The brew became so important in Turkey that a lack of sufficient coffee was an acceptable reason for a woman to seek a divorce.

  The Arabs tried to maintain a monopoly on coffee cultivation by parboiling the seeds to make them infertile. But some time during the 1600s a Muslim pilgrim named Baba Budan smuggled seven fertile seeds out by taping them to his stomach and successfully cultivated them in southern India, in the mountains of Mysore. In 1616 the Dutch, who dominated the world’s shipping trade, managed to transport a tree to Holland from Aden. From its offspring the Dutch began growing coffee in Ceylon in 1658. In 1699 another Dutchman transplanted trees from Malabar to Java, followed by cultivation in Sumatra, Celebes, Timor, Bali, and other islands in the East Indies. For many years to come, the production of the Dutch East Indies determined the price of coffee in the world market.

  Europeans eventually became enamored of the social and medicinal benefits of the Arabian drink. By the 1650s coffee was being sold by Italian street vendors. Venice’s first coffeehouse opened in 1683. Named for the drink it served, the caffè (spelled café elsewhere in Europe) quickly became synonymous with relaxed companionship, animated conversation, and tasty food. Even Britain welcomed coffee, although tea would later supplant it as the favored caffeinated beverage. By 1700, there were 2,000 coffeehouses in London alone, each specializing in its own clientele, and called “penny universities” because of the stimulating conversation to be had for the price of a cup of coffee. Some coffeehouses were for actors, others for writers, businessmen, or sailors.

  It could be argued that coffeehouses affected European culture by helping to sober up its citizens. Until the late
seventeenth century, alcoholic beverages were widely and heartily consumed, from breakfast until the nightcap at bedtime. Coffee contributed to the advent of modern science, commerce, and industry by making clear thought much more common. It also unquestionably helped to spawn revolutions. The American and French revolutions were both planned in coffeehouses, and many Americans switched from tea to coffee after the Boston Tea Party protest of 1773.

  Coffee cultivation spread to the western hemisphere in the eighteenth century. In 1714 the Dutch gave a healthy coffee plant to the French government, and nine years later a French naval officer named Gabriel Mathieu de Clieu introduced coffee cultivation to the French colony of Martinique after nursing a coffee seedling during a perilous transatlantic voyage, later referring to “the infinite care that I was obliged to bestowe upon this delicate plant.” Once it finally set down roots in Martinique, the coffee tree flourished. From that single plant, much of the world’s current coffee supply probably derives.

  In the early eighteenth century, coffee arrived in Brazil and made its way through Central America and Colombia. By 1750 the coffee tree grew on five continents. The semi-tropical arabica coffee plant grows best at an elevation of 3,000 to 6,000 feet in a girdle around the equator, between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, where the temperature never gets too hot or too cold, hovering around 75°F. The beautiful locations are also among the world’s poorest and most violence-prone areas—in part because of the way coffee, a labor-intensive crop, was grown.