Beyond Fair Trade

by Mark Pendergrast

  Every Friday at her school was “culture day,” when Dawan wore traditional Akha dress. When she was twenty, her mother made her a full Akha headdress, with tassels down the back to indicate that she was single. Like most younger Akha, she did not really believe in jungle spirits or divination, but she valued the Akha language and culture.

  I asked her what she thought of Bangkok and other big cities, and whether she wanted to settle down in Doi Chang. “I like learning new things and meeting many people,” she said, “so I enjoy Bangkok, and I want to explore the world. But when I am older, I want to settle here.” The weather was nicer than in the lowlands, the coffee business was thriving, and most important, these were her people, her family.

  I met A Sho, thirty-six, an Akha man who had worked in Taiwan for eight years in an automobile factory. He had returned to Doi Chang to care for his elderly grandfather, who died three years ago, and A Sho was now married, with an eight-month-old son. He had inherited 8 acres on which, of course, he grew coffee. “I know about the pima,” he said, “but I know little about Akha culture really.” He had become a Buddhist, the leader of thirty-five Buddhist Akha families in the village. “My grandfather felt that Buddhism was the same-same with the Akha Way. But when he got sick, he put the Akha string on his wrist.” When A Sho’s son grows up, he will not learn the Akha Way. He will be a Buddhist. I asked if A Sho thought other Akha his age would raise their children as traditional Akha. No, he said, maybe just 20 percent.

  I had seen a slim Akha man with a ponytail and slight limp, who frequently hung out in the coffeehouse. I finally introduced myself and learned his name, Leebang. He had his own coffee brand called Doi Yama, and he drove me with his two cute little girls and baby boy in his pickup down a dirt road just behind the coffeehouse. The road dead-ended at his farm. An older girl was in school in Chiang Rai. He grew coffee on 20 rai but also purchased cherries from other Akha. He had created the Doi Yama brand two years ago. Before that, he sold to Doi Chaang.

  His farm, which offered a stunning view down the valley, had its own processing station, drying patio, and roaster. He had just begun to grow strawberries as a supplemental crop. While I wandered around, his children watched a Thai translation of the Flintstones on a small TV in the warehouse.

  Leebang was one of the processors who had initially supplied Doi Chaang, but whom Wicha and Adel had cut off in 2010 when they upgraded their processing station in order to buy directly from farmers. “All of these guys used to come drink free coffee here at the Doi Chaang coffeehouse and laugh at Wicha,” John Darch Senior told me later, “because they were rebagging cheap coffee from down the mountain and calling it Doi Chaang. They thought Wicha was stupid for not doing the same thing.”

  This story isn’t so simple, I thought as I climbed in bed in my little green cottage up the hill on the other side of the road from the Doi Chaang compound. Yes, it’s an uplifting story showing the impact that an alternative approach to capitalism can have on an oppressed people. But they are still people, and human beings being human, there will always be conflict, greed, misunderstanding, and unforeseen consequences of change, even when the change is clearly for the better.

  Going to School

  ONE OF WICHA’S big plans had been to make education equally accessible to all the children within the region of twenty-five villages. The Doi Chang primary school educated first through ninth grades. Nearly 600 children attended the school, though children without Thai ID cards would receive no graduation certificate and would be unable to pursue further education beyond Grade 9. In the library, which was funded by Doi Chaang Coffee, a group of girls were drawing and painting during an after-school program, and a boy was singing karaoke through a microphone attached to a computer.

  I spent a morning in English classes for seventh, eighth, and ninth graders taught by Meeyae Saedoo, the only Akha teacher in the school. In the first class, most of the students were Akha, with a few Lisu and one Chinese. About half were Christian, with a slight Protestant majority. All of their parents grew coffee, some on small plots, others on up to 40 rai. Most of the students planned to go to Chiang Rai to attend high school, where they would rent rooms.

  As much as I appreciated Meeyae’s energetic teaching efforts, it wasn’t clear how much English her students were learning, as she taught from curriculum-prescribed workbooks. She had them repeat words and sentences, such as “She is going to town at the present moment.” Not only was the language stilted, it was incomprehensible when they repeated the sentences in their heavily accented singsong manner. I only ascertained what they were supposed to be saying by reading the workbook. Meeyae wrote the words living room, kitchen, and bathroom on the blackboard and had the students assign words such as sofa, armchair, fridge, coffee table, and toilet to the correct room.

  Meeyae was an enthusiastic, supportive teacher, but I was saddened that she, the only Akha teacher in the school, was not teaching anything about the Akha way of life—nothing about bamboo platforms, men’s and women’s sides, of a home, ancestor shrines, hunting, gathering medicinal herbs, creation stories, spirits, divination, weddings, or funerals. Nothing about a rich way of life that was disappearing, although of course no one mourned the absence of poverty, malnutrition, and other problems of the recent past.

  The Village Elders

  ANOTHER DAY, I met with the traditional Akha village elders at Piko’s house, a large modern tiled home on the main street. The older men, wearing their fedora hats, sat on rustic benches or cross sections of large trees. We drank tea, as Wicha translated.

  All of the elders, who ranged in age from sixty-six to eighty-two, were part of the Saedoo clan that Piko belonged to, and they still performed important rituals. The pima, Akue Choemue, was right there, one of the elders. He was also the nyipa, the shaman. He killed water buffaloes as part of funeral celebrations and could recite hours of ritual poems and stories. He was training four younger men to be pimas and to carry on the tradition.

  They expressed some concerns about the traditional way of life being eroded by television and increased contact with Thai culture. It was less of an issue with the older generations, but the younger Akha were vulnerable. Some of the elders attended meetings to discuss how to minimize the damage to their traditions. Some wanted to videotape the ceremonies to preserve them. I asked about a written version of the Akha language that Paul Lewis had created. They knew nothing of it and were not interested. Theirs was an oral tradition, and that was it.

  With some trepidation, I asked whether they still killed twins at birth. No, there had been a meeting of Akha from China, Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam, and Thailand in 1998 to discuss many issues, and they had decided to stop the long tradition of smothering twins. No Akha twins had been born in the village since then. Other laws remained unchanged. Were they worried about Ya Ba and heroin use in the village? Yes, they never saw such problems in the past. What about the illegal mobile casinos? They hated them. In the old days, there was some small-time gambling, but not these high-stakes games for millions of baht. Many gamblers came from the lowlands, and they didn’t listen to old people.

  I asked what they used to eat. In the old days, when there was deep jungle, they ate many animals, but once they moved to Doi Chang, there was no more jungle and no animals to hunt. They had carp in a fishpond and grew vegetables. Now that the trees were growing back, wild boar and barking deer were returning. Yes, they sometimes ate dog during a ceremony. And they were fond of bamboo worms.

  What about music? They carved Jew’s harps and a simple flute out of bamboo and used big bamboo poles to thump rhythmically on the ground, along with gongs and drums, to accompany dances. During harvest season, they were always singing, making up new words for ballads. “If we see a bird, we sing about it, or it might be about a young boy kissing a girl and telling her how beautiful she is.”

  That reminded me to ask about the courting yard. Did boys and girls still meet there in the evening to sing, dance, and flirt? No. The c
ourting yard still existed, but it was no longer an important part of social life. “Things change,” an elder said, meaning, What can you do? Most of the teenagers were attending school in Chiang Rai anyway. More Akha were falling in love with and marrying non-tribal members. At least, now that coffee was creating jobs, the young people were moving back home.

  Why had so many Akha converted to Christianity? This was a touchy subject. No, it was not because it was too expensive to sacrifice animals in Akha rituals. A lot of conversions occurred because other family members converted. But, Wicha said, the Christians made everything easy. You could go to heaven without making any sacrifices.

  Mike Mann and ITDP

  THE NEXT DAY, I met Mike Mann, whose father, Dick Mann, had been a coffee pioneer in Thailand. In 1959, when he was two years old, Mike Mann arrived in Thailand with his missionary agronomist parents and grew up there, visiting villages and hiking the mountains with his father. The younger Mann returned to the United States to attend California Polytechnic, where he earned an undergraduate degree in international agronomy and a master’s in plant pathology. In 1990, he came back to Chiang Mai, Thailand, to carry on his father’s work with hill tribes through what was eventually named the Integrated Tribal Development Program (ITDP). The best of the ITDP coffee beans went to Starbucks, but others were sold as the Lanna Coffee brand. (Lanna is the name of a former kingdom in northern Thailand.)

  When Mike Mann arrived in Doi Chang that day, with his coffee manager, Boonchu Kloedu, a Karen tribal member, I feared he would be defensive about the success of Doi Chaang, since Mann had helped form an Akha farmer’s cooperative in Doi Chang in 2002, about the time Wicha was beginning to help Adel. Then Mann had sponsored a Lisu Doi Chang cooperative three years later. Mann had also arranged for coffee from Doi Chang to be part of the Thai Starbucks blend, Muan Jai, introduced in 2004.

  But as Doi Chaang Coffee became a huge success, and prices for freshly picked cherries and processed village beans rose, the farmers abandoned ITDP. Many started roasting their own coffee. “Our last major purchase from Doi Chang was in 2010, when we bought over 50 tons, but it tapered off in 2011,” Mann explained. “People sold to the Doi Chaang co-op or started their own businesses. They learned about the importance of coffee quality from us and some marketing strategy, but now they could do it on their own. So we put our resources in other places. We are not about taking over, but promoting and building awareness.” Mike Mann and Wicha had met at a coffee conference in 2006, he said, but otherwise they appeared to have kept their distance from one another, and there clearly was some tension there. Both claimed credit for improving coffee quality, for instance.

  Then we headed for the village, meeting on a terrace at the home of an Akha named Akaw, who had moved to Doi Chang eighteen years ago and had been one of the original ITDP co-op members. We were joined by Teenoi, a Chinese coffee farmer, and Bancha, a Lisu and one of long-time village chief Beno’s sons. They had invited Mike Mann back to Doi Chang to discuss the possibility of restarting the co-op, since coffee prices were declining. They apologized that more farmers weren’t there, but most had gone to a funeral in Maemon that morning.

  It was an ideal opportunity to ask the farmers about their holdings and operations, with Mike Mann translating. Akaw owned 20 rai at a high altitude near Ban Mai, so his harvest had not yet begun. Teenoi owned a total of 30 rai in various parcels, and Bancha had similar holdings. During the harvest season, they hired pickers from other villages, paying them either a daily wage of 200 baht (about $7) or 4 baht per kilo. In the early harvest season, when there were fewer ripe cherries, the pickers wanted to be paid by the day, but at the height of the season, when a skilled, hardworking harvester could pick 100 kilos, they wanted to be paid by the kilo. The farmers complained that they had to pay for gas to pick up their workers every day. “They make more than we do,” groused Akaw, but that was clearly far from true.

  Akaw and Teenoi sold their cherries to Doi Chaang, but they were not satisfied with the 18 baht per kilo they were getting, and they complained that they had to wait for a month or more to get paid. I made a mental note to ask Adel and Wicha about this allegation. Bancha processed and roasted his own coffee, which he sold as Lisu Doi Chang Coffee. But he, too, was interested in exploring other options. Maybe he would rejoin ITDP.

  The meeting ended without any resolution, in part because only three farmers were there. After the meeting, Mike Mann commented: “They are hedging their bets. We are the David of the Thai coffee industry against a bunch of Goliaths.” By that time, he represented twenty-five villages in Thailand in five provinces, and the Fair Trade certification, which ITDP had pioneered in Thailand, had become a bureaucratic and financial nightmare. “It used to be that ITDP paid a premium fee for the amount of coffee we sold with the Fair Trade label. But they changed that about three years ago so that the farmers themselves had to pay.” In addition, in Thailand, cooperatives had to be formed on the provincial level, but Fair Trade insisted that each of the five ITDP cooperatives pay separate fees. So Mann abandoned the Fair Trade certification in favor of Starbucks’ C.A.F.E. Practices, a stringent company standard.

  My Last Day

  ON MY LAST day of this trip, Bancha, a vigorous, nice-looking man of forty-eight with a thick mop of black hair (in contrast to his bald father), invited me back to see the three caged civet cats he had recently acquired. He wasn’t sure he’d be able to sell the civet coffee for the big prices he had heard about. So far, his well-cared-for civets hadn’t produced much.

  We walked up the nearby hill to the Doi Chang Resort, where Bancha showed me the small room where he and his younger sister, Chome, roasted and bagged their beans for the Lisu Doi Chang Coffee brand. There I met Chome, who spoke very good English, having worked for IMPECT before returning to Doi Chang to join the family coffee business and start the resort. She spoke fluently and earnestly about “indigenous people” and “sustainability,” and she said she had started a women’s group in Doi Chang. She was applying for a grant to go to Missoula, Montana, to study for three months, hoping to become a more savvy businesswoman. She showed me a mockup for Abeno Coffee, a new brand she wanted to launch with her father’s face on it, in obvious imitation of Piko’s image on the Doi Chaang bags. She suggested that I stay at her resort on my next visit, and she could translate when I interviewed her father.

  Back at the Doi Chaang compound, Nuda explained how she made soap. As I was about to leave, she took a solid silver Akha bracelet off her wrist and insisted that I take it to my wife. “Nuda, I can’t take this, it’s yours,” I said. “I really want you to have it, Abopala,” she said, pressing it on me. I was touched, and I liked the new nickname I had earned this trip—I was Abopala, which means “honored old white man.”

  As Adel drove down the mountain, we chatted, and his English was much better than I had realized. I asked him whether the Lisu had looked down on the Akha when he was a child. Yes, and perhaps there remained some vestige of that prejudice “in their hearts,” but no one would say it aloud. The younger generation was growing up without such prejudices, he said, and in the future Akha and Lisu might intermarry more frequently.

  I told Adel that I had grown up in the American South in the 1950s, when blacks and whites could not use the same water fountains or schools. He was surprised. I told him that had all changed, in my lifetime, and that now whites and blacks could intermarry without huge concern, and that it was amazing how cultures could change so dramatically and quickly. But subtle prejudices remained.

  We got to the airport. I thanked Adel again and grabbed my suitcase, already looking forward to my next visit to the village of Doi Chang, when I would arrive in time for the annual Academy of Coffee celebration the following April.

  CHAPTER 9

  Carry On

  ON THE MORNING OF Thursday, January 23, 2014, I turned on my computer as usual in my home office in Vermont, where I was beginning to write this book. Before I went back to my draft ch
apter, I checked the inbox of my e-mail and saw a message from John Darch Senior with the subject heading: Wicha Passed Away January 22. I stared at it dumbly for a moment. What? I opened the e-mail and read:

  Dear Mark,

  It is with deep sadness that I’m writing to inform you of the sudden passing of our dear friend and founder, Wicha Promyong, who died unexpectedly in Doi Chang Village, on Wednesday, January 22.

  As you know, for more than a decade, Khun Wicha dedicated his life to the well being of the Akha hill tribe of Doi Chang Village, and it was his innovation and passion that led to the creation and success of Doi Chaang Coffee.

  There simply are no words to express our shock and heartbreak over the loss of such an amazing inspirational person, and our deepest sympathies are with his wife, children and our extended family at Doi Chang Village.

  I thought you would like to know before it is announced publicly today.

  –John

  I couldn’t believe it. Wicha had seemed indestructible, almost an elemental life force. A subsequent message from Darch read in part:

  Wicha… appears to have had a massive heart attack. We are all feeling so much distress by the loss of such an inspirational man and I can’t imagine the grief of his wife, children and everyone at Doi Chang and so many throughout Thailand and Asia, and indeed the world. He touched and was loved by so many. I loved him deeply as a brother and will miss him so much, but I have wonderful memories.