Beyond Fair Trade

by Mark Pendergrast

  Everyone in the village now had income relating to coffee, one way or the other. This boom was bringing more and more people to Doi Chang, and there was some concern that the village was becoming too congested. While the growth meant more and varied jobs—for cooks, construction workers, fruit growers, motorcycle repairmen, for example—it was now harder for villagers to find room to grow vegetables near home.

  We then stopped at a community gathering spot, where men, women, and children sat or reclined on a raised bamboo platform shaded from the hot afternoon sun by a makeshift roof, where I spoke to Boocha, a woman who lived nearby. She was a Catholic, she told me, along with everyone else there. There were ninety-six households in the neighborhood. She was converted twenty-two years ago by Italian missionaries from Mae Suai, down the mountain.

  A young man leaning on his motor scooter seemed particularly friendly and interested. Unlike many of the older Akha, Worachit spoke fluent Thai. He grew coffee on 3 rai and sold his cherries to Doi Chaang. “Wicha is a good man,” he said. “He helps people.” He knew that some of his beans might go abroad somewhere for farangs to drink, maybe Canada, he had heard.

  I asked if anyone still had a thatched roof, and Worachit surprised me by saying that he did, though he didn’t like having to patch it, and he planned to replace it with metal when he could afford to. Intrigued, I asked if we could see it, so we followed his scooter far down a truly awful, narrow dirt road and stopped beside a tiny thatched hut with children’s clothes hanging on a line in the back. His home had a bamboo floor and two rooms. He and his daughter, six, and son, four, slept together on one side, while his wife and eight-month-old daughter slept in the other room. On the rough wooden walls were pictures of Mary and the baby Jesus and, of course, the king and queen. On a shelf sat a very small television set.

  Back in the truck, we drove back up to the main road, turned left, and soon turned off into a courtyard where we found the Lisu macadamia factory in full swing, since this was the harvest season. The round brown casings that contain the white nut meat grow inside something resembling a dark green walnut shell. A clattery machine took off the shells, and then the unripe “floaters” were picked from the surface of the water. The rest of the smooth round brown balls, which reminded me of giant gumballs, had to be slow roasted and dried at low heat for three days. Then they were cracked open one at a time by women operating a simple device that brought a sharp point down on each shell, cracking it gently without harming the gumdrop-shaped nut inside. The nuts could then be further roasted, sometimes flavored with honey or other spices.

  The afternoon was waning by the time we found a Lisu man in his late fifties who was willing to talk to us as his grandchildren played nearby. I forgot to ask for his name. “Yes, I grow coffee,” he said, on 5 acres. He used to grow rice, corn, and eggplant, but now, coffee and some macadamia and Chinese cherry. He sold his coffee to Doi Chaang, using the profits to improve his house, which was made of concrete blocks. He had been born in this location in a thatched hut.

  He said that there was no longer friction between the Lisu and Akha. His nephew was married to an Akha woman. “It will be easier for my grandchildren, but I wouldn’t be sitting here doing this interview in my father’s generation. They didn’t talk to strangers.” It wasn’t that the Lisu and Akha hated each other in years past, he said. They just stayed in their own groups, that’s all, with very limited interactions.

  An Education in Coffee

  ANOTHER DAY I was lucky enough to meet agronomist Patchanee Suwanwisolkit, who had been so instrumental in helping the Akha. From Chiang Mai University, she brought an expert, entomologist Professor Yaowaluk Chanbang, to teach farmers from Doi Chang and nearby villages about how to control coffee berry borers (Hypothenemus hampei, known as broca in Latin America), a tiny black insect nuisance, without using chemicals.

  The infestation had to be caught when the cherries were just forming. It would be too late once the coffee beans were mature. “Females can bore into cherries as small as 2.3 millimeters,” the entomologist said. They chew chambers in the coffee seed in which they lay their eggs. The hatched larvae then feed on the seeds. He recommended that each farmer get a magnifying glass. All diseased cherries had to be picked off. He flashed photos of the insect’s life cycle—eggs, larvae, pupa, adult—all of them living inside a coffee cherry. Then he demonstrated how to make a simple trap out of an empty plastic bottle, cutting a section from the middle and hanging a small bottle of scented lure—three parts methanol to one part ethanol—to attract the bugs. Drill a hole through the bottle cap to hang it by wire to the tree, and put soapy water in the bottom to catch and drown the insects.

  As he explained all of this, I talked to a few visiting farmers. Sura Phon, a Lisu from Doi Lan, had started with a half-acre thirteen years ago and now owned 30 acres of coffee. He grew supplementary crops including cabbage, radish, and tomato and some fruit trees. Unlike most farmers, he drank his own coffee, he said. Yes, he had noticed a lot more birds now, and he planned to plant more shade trees, including some macadamia. I asked what he did for fun. “I am too busy to play.”

  Yi Pha, an Akha from Ban Mai, told me he had been growing coffee for eight years on 7 acres because it guaranteed a more stable income than the tomatoes he used to grow. As he spoke, I noticed his reddish brown teeth, stained from chewing betel nut. Yes, he said, he now had a Thai ID card, which Adel helped him to get when he was village chief.

  I asked Wicha if there had been a turning point for the village. He explained how he had motivated two Akha brothers, Law Beh and La Cho, who own about 10 acres nearby. “I told them, trust me, follow me, you do the way I am teaching, you do pruning, mulching, fertilizer like this, I guarantee that you will get at least 80,000 baht. But whatsoever, if you make more money, it belong to you. The first year they follow me, they make more than 300,000 baht. That was ten years ago. Two boys start doing it. Some follow, more and more now, doing shade-grown, mulching, pruning.”

  I told him that I was confused about who owned the land, since I had read that, technically, the government had declared all of the northern mountains a national preserve. “In a sense they own their own land to grow coffee on, but they have no rights by law, no papers.” But the government couldn’t realistically confiscate the land, since it was doing too well already. “Instead, the government now brings people up here to show them what we are doing and to take credit for it. I don’t care, as long as the way of life of my people is better,” Wicha said.

  He explained how he had studied the tea, honey, and soap businesses, and he hoped to expand into a line of cosmetics, having found that coffee oil was good for the complexion. He had also added a small line of Doi Chaang macadamia nuts. For three years, Doi Chaang had been the exclusive agent for small Colombian coffee pulpers. “We sell to Laos, Burma, Thailand, all over.” He had convinced Paolo Fantaguzzi, the Italian who had installed the new Brambati roaster, to move to Thailand and start the Ital-Thai Service Company, to build and repair brewers and, eventually, to build their own coffee roasters. “I can’t just keeping doing one thing, you know?” Wicha said. “We have to do everything by our own.”

  Wicha said that there were now some 300 coffeehouses serving Doi Chaang Coffee in Thailand, six in Australia, five in Japan, two big shops in Malaysia, and he had ambitious plans for 300 Korean cafés within the next two years. “They asked for 1,200 in Korea, but we don’t have enough coffee yet to supply them,” he said. That made me ask why he still needed the Canadians, if he could sell so much roasted coffee for a bigger profit right there in Asia. It was thanks to Darch and his company, he said, that Doi Chaang coffee had gained international recognition. “Don’t forget that we start together, you know? People know the name Doi Chaang. That’s from Canada. Ourselves, we know how to grow coffee, how to produce coffee. But to introduce to the market, they do it. We are family, we are family. We work together,” he said, clasping his hands together. “Not just business.”

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bsp; I asked Wicha whether the sudden relative wealth from coffee might be too much for some of the Akha to handle. “Now everyone gets paid,” he said. “Some want to show off, go to town, spend money like rich man, buy new truck every year, new house in town, gambling. These are mostly men in their forties and fifties.” Yes, there were drug problems in Doi Chang, especially methamphetamines called Ya Ba. “To solve this problem, we asked the military to base here.”

  Still, he had high hopes for young people. He wanted the Doi Chaang Coffee Foundation to build a $2 million school for children from all twenty-five villages in the district. The school would have room to house one hundred children who came from too far away to commute. “All tribes will learn to be together.”

  Wicha still seemed to be the heart and soul of the operation. I wondered what would happen if he were bitten by a cobra? Would the business collapse? Would Adel and Miga be able to carry on without their visionary leader?

  In Chiang Rai, before flying back to Bangkok, I met Wicha’s charming daughter Kwan, my waitress at the Doi Chaang Coffeehouse. This was the café’s third location, larger and more central than the previous spots. With its trees and courtyard, it provided an oasis from the busy city street. Its menu extended beyond coffee, including goodies such as coffee fudge, coconut pie, and macadamia brownies, along with homemade ice cream flavors such as strawberry, green tea, and mixed berry. There were also light lunches to appeal to Western tourists, ranging from mushroom Panini sandwiches to a hamburger and fries. Although they may have faced a steep learning curve, it was obvious that Wicha’s family, many of whom lived in the back of the coffeeshop, ran a sophisticated, popular operation that was attracting both locals and tourists.

  Harvest Time in the Mountains

  I RETURNED TO Doi Chang in November 2013, near the start of the frenetic harvest season. Every afternoon, pickup trucks laden with bulging burlap bags lined up near huge scales next to the processing station. Farmers threw the bags with freshly picked coffee cherries onto the scales, then anxiously awaited the results, before a team of Doi Chaang workers emptied the sacks into a huge vat of ripe cherries. The farmers received a chit to redeem for cash at the ATM machine down the road. In 2013, with the C-market prices dropping, they received 18 baht per kilo early in the season, when there were more unripe berries in the mix. A week or two into the season, the price would go up to 20 baht.

  With the cash flowing more slowly than it had in 2012, Wicha took a two-day trip to borrow money from a couple of banks in Nan Province. Despite the fact that Thai banks don’t like to lend money on volatile commodities, Doi Chaang was now well known within Thailand, and the loans wouldn’t be difficult to secure.

  The previous morning in Bangkok, before flying to Chiang Rai, I had met John Darch Junior and Anand Pawa, who had been in Shanghai striking a deal with two young sisters whose father had begun Oro Caffè, based in Udine, Italy. Oro Caffè had ordered a container of green beans to roast or sell in Italy, Germany, and France. “If all goes well, this could be a big foot in the door in continental Europe,” Darch Junior said.

  Then we picked up a Rainforest Alliance auditor from Indonesia, who was joining us to explore certification for Doi Chaang beans. Darch Junior explained that Fair Trade certification was cumbersome and expensive, with a 20 cent per pound charge at both the green bean and roasted level. “Plus we have to pay the $4,200 annual auditing fee.” Rainforest Alliance charged only for the audit, so many roasters were considering a switch away from Fair Trade.

  We flew to Chiang Rai and drove up to Doi Chang. All seemed amicable at first, but talks with the Rainforest auditor soon turned tense. He wanted more information about the farmers than anyone could easily provide. Anand Pawa, Wicha, and Darch Junior explained that any village farmer could sell to Doi Chaang, but that they were also free to go elsewhere. Rainforest wanted a more formal cooperative arrangement. The next morning, the auditor left without any resolution of the issue.

  Wild or Captive Civet Cats?

  DOI CHAANG COFFEE had been cleared of any involvement of cruelty to civets, but I wanted to see for myself how the Doi Chaang civet beans were found and collected. The day after a heavy downpour, Lipi’s brother Jay led me up into Lipi’s steep acreage. I brought my small digital video camera to document the trek, which I undertook in my sandals, slipping badly and clutching onto coffee and shade trees to keep my balance. After a very challenging climb, we finally located a mound of civet-pooped coffee beans, clustered between the coffee trees. Jay explained that they wouldn’t pick it up until the end of the harvest season, because a civet would return to the same place to defecate only if the site remained undisturbed. We climbed further up the mountainside and found several more civet cat deposits. We also encountered Jay’s sister-in-law picking coffee cherries; she had told him where to find the deposits of civet coffee.

  Jay said that he could tell the difference between wild and caged coffee poop, that the wild version was darker, with more variation in bean size. He had never seen a civet cat, since they come out only at night. As I clambered down the muddy mountainside, splashing over a stream, I considered that it would indeed be easier to feed caged civets, but I could now prove that the Doi Chaang civet coffee I witnessed was authentically wild.†

  Later I found that some villagers were raising civets in cages, feeding them coffee cherries, and attempting to market them for a large profit. But none of them were trying to sell them to Doi Chaang. The caged civets I saw did not appear to be mistreated, and their owners were obviously unaware that they were doing anything wrong or controversial. The civets, which looked like skinny raccoons, were kept in relatively large, separate cages, and were fed coffee cherries and bananas. Nonetheless, I agreed with Wicha and the WSPA that civets are wild animals and should not be kept captive.

  Cordyceps

  BACK FROM HIS trip to woo bankers, Wicha revealed that he had several new projects on the go. Eight types of edible and medicinal mushrooms from Hungary and Nepal were growing in moist test wood in plastic jugs, with a small building under construction for mushroom agronomy near the pulp pile. Wicha said that the mushrooms thrived using the pulp as a growing medium. “Just one hundred pots of mushrooms, it feeds like ten or twenty families, and you don’t have to invest a lot,” he explained. He planned to use it as a demonstration project for villagers, who could get a tenfold return by growing their own mushrooms and selling them fresh or dried. A Chiang Mai University professor would come every week to offer tutorials.

  In the basement of the office building, Wicha was having equipment installed to process and bottle fruit and energy drinks he planned to make from the mushrooms and local wild fruits, as well as blue and green teas, along with bottled water. He created a new corporate name for each new business. Doi Chaang EcoZone would make the drinks, and Doi Chaang BioGrade the mushrooms. But the biggest and most exciting project was to grow cordyceps, a fungus that was gaining a growing reputation as an alternative medicine. The parasitic fungus grows in spectacularly ghoulish fashion from the bodies of caterpillars and spiders in the mountains of Tibet and Nepal, sprouting in stringy orange growths that kill their hosts. It has been used in traditional Chinese medicine for centuries and is supposed to prevent various types of cancer and kidney disease, strengthen the immune system, increase energy levels, and act as an aphrodisiac.

  Over the summer, a Thai entrepreneur nicknamed Nong (Chayanin Sritisarn) had seen Wicha on a television program and contacted him. Having made a substantial amount of money from selling a chicken processing business, she was seeking a more life-affirming enterprise and had hooked up with Professor Tawat Tapingkae of Chiang Mai University, who experimented with various types of cordyceps. I met them when Nong and Professor Tawat drove up the mountain one afternoon to see how their new lab in the Academy of Coffee was doing. Nong and Professor Tawat explained that Cordyceps sinensis, the traditional Tibetan version, had to grow from a medium using ground-up insects, but that Cordyceps militaris, which
contained even more of the active ingredients adenosine and cordyceptin, could grow in a medium of cooked rice. Professor Tawat turned out to be the mushroom expert Wicha had been telling me about, and he was also an orchid specialist. Wicha was sure he could sell a brand of Doi Chaang Cordyceps in the coffeehouses for a sizable profit.

  That evening, Nong, a slim, lively woman in her forties with a ready smile, roasted sweet potatoes and coconuts for us over the fire, while Wicha and I grew mellow and sang folk songs, though he complained that he had trouble catching his breath. To end the evening we sang the old African peace anthem “Kumbaya.” “We are hand in hand, Kumbaya, we are hand in hand, Kumbaya… Ah, good!” he declared. Then he retired to sleep behind his desk, having abandoned his hut after he found that he was about to share his bed with a python.

  Over the next few days, I talked to several new people. Dawan, twenty-six, the third of five siblings, worked in the Doi Chaang office next to A-Roy’s noodle shop, and she was the one who sat at the table handing out chits every day as farmers brought their coffee cherries to be weighed. She was yet another Akha relative, Adel’s niece. Lipi and Jay were her older brothers, and she told me that she was embroidering a traditional Akha shirt as a wedding present for Jay, who in January would be marrying a Thai woman who worked for a television station in Bangkok.

  Dawan spoke good English, in part because she had spent three months in Panama City, Florida, part of a work/travel program sponsored by Chiang Mai Commercial College, where she earned a business degree. Her mother, Piko’s daughter Misor, had married an Akha man from Chiang Mai, so Dawan had grown up in that city’s suburbs, three hours to the south, but she frequently visited her grandparents in Doi Chang, living with Piko and his wife, Bu Chu, every summer. “I loved the Swing Ceremony,” she said. “It was so much fun. You could see the whole valley, and I felt like I could fly.”