Beyond Fair Trade

by Mark Pendergrast

  Public relations director Katharine Sawchuk had plans to promote Doi Chaang Coffee at Destination Thailand, an event to be sponsored by the Thai Embassy in Toronto’s Yonge-Dundas Square in September. This was a chance for thousands to sample Doi Chaang coffee, which was particularly exciting because Doi Chaang blends were newly available in Longo’s and Freshco chains in Ontario. To capitalize on a forthcoming article on Doi Chaang in Canada’s Financial Post, Sawchuk planned to send gift baskets to promising Toronto outlets, bloggers, and media. Another positive development was that Fair Trade Canada was becoming more proactive, planning a Fair Trade promotion, “The Power of You,” in major grocery chains, and Doi Chaang would be prominent in the Fair Trade literature.

  At City Market, Doi Chaang blends were on sale for $10.49 in the 340 gram bags, versus Ethical Bean’s $12.99 sale price for the same size bag—and the Doi Chaang bags were also positioned at eye-level, thanks to Joe, the friendly store manager. Such personal connections were very difficult to make, but they were worth pursuing because of the return on time investment. Doi Chaang had therefore decided to hire a full-time merchandiser to keep tabs on retail stores, making sure they were well stocked and the products well positioned.

  The new Doi Chaang Aroma cups were not selling well, though, regardless of their positioning and competitive pricing. The single-serve capsules worked in the current generation of Keurig machines, but the Keurig 2.0 was due out soon, and it would not accept anything but the company’s K-Cups. Litigation against the Keurig monopoly effort was pending. With the future of Aroma cups uncertain, Doi Chaang was not going to spend its limited marketing budget on trying to increase their sales.

  Meanwhile, Darch Senior mulled over the future of the company. Following the staff meeting with Rob Napoli, he recognized the importance of having a strategic business plan to look forward to the next few years. A chain of Doi Chaang coffeehouses in Canada was one possibility. “My talent is not on the operational side,” he acknowledged, but he was good at overall vision and leadership. He regarded the coffee venture as similar to starting a junior mining company, which would be successful only if it found investors. “We need to find strategic partners to help us get to the next level. I don’t have a short list yet. I don’t know who we’ll marry, but I can tell you the virtues of our future mate—a well-funded person who helped develop a successful coffee company, with experience in marketing and organization.” But whoever came aboard would have to buy into the model of 50 percent Akha ownership. That part would remain nonnegotiable.

  Anand Pawa felt the company needed a passionate specialty coffee person, perhaps a Q cupper. “None of us are really coffee people,” he said. “We go to SCAA meetings, and people don’t know what to make of us.” In other words, they just ran an office. He thought they needed to have their own roaster by the end of 2015. They were losing money by staying with Canterbury because Canterbury charged too much for various services.

  Darch Senior agreed that “we have reached the level of sales where it makes sense mathematically to roast our own, but math is one thing, and skill sets is another. For our growth, we have to reach outside our company for expertise in marketing, sales, and operations.” Until then, he planned to stick with Canterbury.

  The partnership forged by Wicha Promyong and John Darch seemed to be working remarkably well. But as I discovered during three research trips to the village of Doi Chang, tragedy and conflict might have derailed all the progress already made there. Since this book became a kind of personal odyssey for this coffee author, I have switched to the first person to write the final two chapters of this saga.

  CHAPTER 8

  An Outside Perspective

  THE CANADIAN SIDE of the company went to great lengths to maintain a solid relationship with the Thai side. It was company policy to take the Vancouver employees (those who stayed at least three years) to Doi Chang to show them where the coffee they sold came from and why it was so important. I was invited to accompany some staff on one of these trips in March 2013 so that I could see for myself how the company operated and what changes it had produced in the village.

  The rainy season hadn’t yet begun, and as we drove up the mountain to the village, the hillsides, mostly barren of trees, were brown and unappealing. Some still smoldered from illegal fires set to clear the brush. On the side of the road, we saw garlic bulbs spread out to dry. As we neared the top, we entered a more forested region, with coffee seedlings by the side of the road, growing under black cloth screens to shade them. An off-shoot road forked left to the Akha village of Saen Charoen and another went right to the Lisu village of Doi Lan, but we kept straight on and crested a ridge near the top of the mountain. Now the landscape was completely transformed, with trees everywhere, some towering over us, others shorter, sporting the glossy green leaves I recognized as belonging to coffee shrubs.

  We could see the village of Doi Chang tucked into the valley below, but before we got there, we turned off the road to the left onto what looked like a large concrete parking lot. It was, in fact, the drying patio for processed Doi Chaang coffee beans. The harvest had ended a few weeks earlier, so there were only a few remaining beans scattered near the big processing mill to the right, with its various concrete vats where the coffee cherries had been fermented for twelve hours, then depulped and fermented again in water—twenty-four hours for “semi-washed” and forty-eight hours for “fully washed”—before being demucilaged. A big conveyor belt at a 30-degree angle reached up from the processing plant. Below its highest point was a huge pile of cherry pulp. Worms and special bacteria had been added to help turn the new pile more quickly into fertile compost to spread beneath coffee trees.

  Next door, women sat around tables, sorting the processed green coffee beans, removing any that were broken, bug-damaged, over-fermented, or otherwise imperfect. And next door there was a large warehouse with piles of burlap bags bulging with coffee. Many contained beans still resting in parchment, their papery outer covering. They would be hulled shortly before they were shipped out.

  I was to discover all of this shortly, but first we got out of the van, stretched our legs, and walked left into the brand-new two-story coffeehouse, which would be dedicated that night. We ordered coffee drinks—I got a beautiful cappuccino—at the bar, then sat at tables made of cross sections of rustic logs. The chairs, too, were rough-hewn and solid.

  I met Adel, a round-faced man with straight, silky jet-black hair and an engaging smile, dressed in conventional, comfortable slacks and a sports shirt. He looked much younger than his forty-three years. As a child, he spoke only Akha, but now he was fluent in Thai and could understand much of what I said in English. He was just uncomfortable trying to communicate in English.

  Then a small man with a scraggly beard and loose-fitting clothes strode over the parking lot from the large Academy of Coffee building at the far end of the concrete drying patio, where Doi Chaang delivery trucks were lined up. Wicha Promyong greeted me with a firm handshake after shifting his ever-present clippers to his left hand. He later explained that he used the clippers to snip promising cuttings of unusual plants. The clippers were almost a security blanket for him. He even slept with them next to his pillow in his “palace,” as he called the tiny thatched-roof hut where he lived in a small leafy glade to the left of the Academy.

  Wicha spoke excellent English (he had lived four years in England, and his first wife was Scottish), so I didn’t need a translator. Despite his maniacally busy schedule—he always seemed to be explaining something, planning a new project, or talking on his cell phone—he spent a lot of time with me over the next few days, explaining the operation, telling me about his childhood and remarkable life, describing the plight of the hill tribes, and outlining his vision for the future.

  We piled into a four-wheel drive truck for a tour. Over time, I drew a rough map of Doi Chang and the surrounding area, reproduced at the front of this book, as improved by graphic artist Carol MacDonald.


  We drove out of the Doi Chaang Coffee compound and turned left, passing A-Roy’s noodle soup restaurant, a small office building, and the Doi Chaang Mart (which features the highest ATM machine in Thailand). We descended to a Y intersection where we turned left to go down to the village. The roads here were concrete, old and cracked, but more durable than the new asphalt. My first impression was that this was a sleepy, poverty-stricken area, with scruffy children and chickens in the road, red clay gashes, clothes hung on lines outside ramshackle homes, and vegetables drying on bamboo platforms. But then I noticed all the motor scooters and trucks, the satellite dishes, and some modern-looking homes amidst the shacks, and I realized that in its way, Doi Chang was a boomtown.

  In the middle of the village, we turned right and started uphill. The road deteriorated quickly, then turned into rutted dirt, as we bounced higher and crested a ridge. We were surrounded by hundreds of acres of lush coffee trees in delightfully fragrant bloom. This was a critical time, when a severe storm and high winds could severely impact the next crop. The white coffee flowers last only a few days, though they bloom on the mountain in waves over a few weeks, during which the honeybees busily work to produce the special Doi Chaang coffee honey.

  We lurched from side to side, then stopped to get out and explore. We walked down among the blossoming coffee trees, which enveloped us in their gentle, sweet odor. Wicha pointed out the macadamia shade trees as well as a white-flowering tree he called a siew, explaining that it fixed nitrogen to enrich the soil. A few workers were pruning coffee trees nearby. In his emphatic way, Wicha used the present tense, though he was talking about the past: “Many grow tomatoes and cabbage here. I hate that kind of crop. They cut down all trees, and they spray insecticides and chemical fertilizer. Then the price drop, no use even harvesting. And people get sick from the pesticide. You see this?” He swept his arm expansively. “Coffee is beautiful crop, no need for chemicals.” Indeed, with the coffee and its shade trees, biodiversity had returned to the area. We could hear birds singing, insects thrumming. Snakes, deer, and civet cats had reportedly come back to the mountain, along with pythons and cobras.

  We continued our drive to Ban Mai, which means “New Village,” an outpost of raggedy-looking dwellings near the coffee fields, then looped back to the intersection where we had turned down to the village. This time we turned left to go up the mountain, past the Wawi Highland Agricultural Research Station and its thousand-plus acres that had been snatched from the Lisu and Akha back in the 1980s, past a few small Akha communities hanging onto the left side of the road, past the Royal Project on the right and the military outpost on the left, and up to a park owned by the research station, with a spectacular view of the mountaintop and valley. “You see?” Wicha said. “It looks like elephant’s head with trunk curved back.”

  On the return trip, we stopped in the middle of a peaceful bamboo grove that featured multiple statues of Buddha, apparently over a century old, though no one knows who brought them there. We walked quietly through the grove and came to a swampy pond with lily pads, hanging moss, bromeliads, and croaking frogs. Around the far end, we came to a circular stone-walled well, one of the nine sacred wells from which the Thai king drinks once a year. A young monk, whom I later met, lives nearby in a small house with its own temple area. He walks down into the village every morning with his begging bowl, but few could blame him for hitching a ride back up the steep slope.

  We drove back to the Doi Chaang compound. There I met Miga, Adel’s younger sister, at her desk in the Academy, where she kept track of orders and maintained records. A short woman with a ready laugh, Miga was the one who worked most closely with Wicha, whose desk sat just behind hers. I also met Nuda, a niece of Miga and Adel, who made the Doi Chaang soap, and Lipi, a nephew, who grew tea as well as coffee.

  That night we took part in a feast to celebrate the opening of the new coffeehouse, with many Akha men and women in attendance. The men looked debonair in their fedora hats and sober dark pants, with their brightly colored embroidered vests and bags hung from their shoulders. The women were decked out in elaborate leggings, skirts, and jackets, topped by extraordinary headdresses, dripping with silver coins, balls, colored feathers, and beads. They laughed and gossiped in Akha as they ate.

  There was an extravagant amount of food, including lots of meat—beef, chicken, pork, duck—as if to make up for all the years of poverty on the barren hillside where game had disappeared along with wild edibles. Wicha told me that at one stage people had been reduced to eating fried banana flowers with salt.

  To round out my first day, as the darkness fell, we gathered in the Academy of Coffee around the fire. (That fire was kept smoldering all day to cure the thick thatched roof and prevent insects from eating it.) Wicha and I sat against the wall, where he sipped his green tea and smoked a cigarette. I observed that he really ought to quit smoking. He just laughed. I said that his body was too small to abuse like that. Maybe that’s why he was more tired than usual, he said. He didn’t want to travel so much anymore.

  I love to sing, especially old folk songs, and Wicha had told me he used to be a rock musician and protest singer, so I asked if we might sing something we both knew. It turned out he knew a lot of songs—Bob Dylan; Joan Baez; John Denver; the Kingston Trio; Peter, Paul & Mary; Hank Williams; Harry Belafonte; Nat King Cole; and other old tunes—so I harmonized above his sensitive, smoky baritone, sitting around a fire there on a mountain in Thailand. Then he broke into “Malaika,” an African song. I pulled out my harmonica, on which Wicha played a lively version of “Oh! Susanna” and a soulful version of “There’s No Place Like Home.” This man will be my friend, I thought.

  The Village

  THE NEXT DAY Anand Pawa, Lipi, and I drove down into the village. I wanted to get more of a sense of who lived there and how coffee had impacted their lives. Coffee trees were growing in front yards, coffee beans drying on various patios.

  In addition to those who called themselves traditional Akha in the village, there were a sizable number of Catholic and Protestant Akha—perhaps as many as 70 percent of the villagers. The Catholics had mostly been converted by Korean or Italian missionaries, and the Protestants (just called “Christians,” as opposed to “Catholics”), had been converted primarily by American Baptists, Australian evangelists, or Aje, who all those years ago had convinced his father, Aso, to become a Christian. A small but growing number of Akha had become Buddhists. The remaining Lisu—many of whose relatives had left for the lowlands in the 1990s—lived on the high side of the village. There were a few Chinese families in the same neighborhood, and some Chinese had intermarried with Lisu. The old antagonisms seemed mostly to have been consigned to the past.

  Near the main road, I saw a traditional Akha swing, its four tall posts tied with thickly twined vines at the top. It stood ready to carry boys, girls, and adults for three days the following August or September, during the annual fall Swing Festival. I asked where the upper village gate was, and Lipi led me to a small gate such as I had seen in books, with wooden birds atop it and a carved woman and man (with an oversized penis) outside it. But the gate was lost amidst a jumble of houses, as were the other two village gates. Doi Chang had spilled outside the gates, which had traditionally divided and protected the Akha from threatening jungle spirits and outsiders. No one had bothered to replace them annually, so they were slowly rotting. This is a sad, symbolic commentary on fading traditions, I thought.

  The houses, mostly made of concrete cinderblock and lumber, with corrugated metal roofs, were jammed close to one another, with little room for vegetable gardens, which had been moved near the coffee fields. Land on the main road sold for $1.5 million baht ($50,000) for a hundred square meters (about a thousand square feet), while prime coffee-growing land cost 50,000 baht ($1,700) per rai (about 0.4 acres), putting it far beyond the reach of the average laborer.

  No one knew exactly how many people lived full-time in Doi Chang. The official census, taken ever
y ten years, is unreliable, because illegal immigrants from Burma and Laos are, of course, unregistered. There are probably 8,000 to 10,000 people living in Doi Chang, and during the coffee harvest, that number could nearly double with temporary workers. There were signs of new construction everywhere, with raw red clay cut away, rebar sticking up from concrete foundations. Almost all of this growth had taken place in the past ten years, with the pace increasing in the past five years, after the Canadians had begun to buy Doi Chaang beans.

  A consumer lifestyle was becoming established. Somsak, a former village chief and another cousin of Adel, invited us into his spacious home, where we sat on a couch in his tile-floored living room on the second floor, which featured a large flat-screen television. The house was only a year old, with room for his three children, ages fourteen, sixteen, and twenty, but they were all in school down in Chiang Rai. He ran a business on the bottom floor of his home, bottling Ja Dae Water. The brand name came from the city of Ja Dae in Yunnan Province, from which the Akha had allegedly been forced to flee centuries ago. Water piped from a spring up the mountain was subjected to UV light and a reverse osmosis process. His sixteen-year-old son, home on vacation, was using a hair dryer to melt hygienic plastic over the filled bottles to seal them. Somsak said that the spring water coming out of his tap was perfectly safe, but he had to treat the bottled water to meet Thai FDA inspection criteria.

  Somsak also owned a 30-acre coffee farm and his own brand, Ja Dae Coffee, which he roasted and sold in Bangkok, Chiang Rai, and elsewhere. The Doi Chaang trucks transported his coffee for a fee. Why would they help the competition? “We all help each other,” he said, which is the same thing Adel had told me. There was a big enough market for everyone.