Beyond Fair Trade

by Mark Pendergrast

  Back in Chiang Mai, Richard Mann took me to the ITDP offices, where I saw photos of other impressive village projects, including Ma Oh Jo, another Karen village. Twelve years ago, Richard had to walk there, but now there’s a dirt road. ITDP started with a water/latrine project, then agricultural help with growing beans and other subsistence crops, a school, and now coffee, a biogas project, and a fish pond. “I hope the government will pave the road so we can get the coffee out with big trucks,” he said. We also visited the Lanna Café, where ITDP sells its beans, which are roasted next door.

  Akha Ama Coffee

  IT TURNS OUT I missed visiting another important coffeehouse in Chiang Mai called Akha Ama (“Ama” means “mother” in the Akha language), founded by a young man named Lee Ayu Chuepa. In 1998, at the age of thirteen, he left Maejantai, the small Akha village where he grew up, to attend a Buddhist temple school in Lampang. He never converted, but he liked the monks’ philosophy and way of life. Lee then went on to study English at Chiang Mai Rajabhat University, becoming the first person from his village of thirty-two households to graduate from college. He interned for the Child’s Dream Foundation, a Chiang Mai charity that attempts to empower marginalized children and youth.

  Lee went on to work full-time for the charity for over three years, an eye-opening experience. “I used to think I was a very unlucky person because I’m born in a village, and nobody even spoke Thai, much less English, so I had to start from zero to learn how to speak Thai. But with Child’s Dream, when I went to the refugee camps, I realized how many people are more unlucky than I am. People who don’t even have a leg, because they stepped on a land mine. So many children dying because of malnutrition and malaria and disease.”

  Still, Lee longed for home. “I missed my roots.” On his visits back to Maejantai, a mountain village not too far to the west of Doi Chang in Mae Suai District, he lamented that most children had no money for education beyond the village primary school. They moved to the lowlands to work in gas stations, restaurants, karaoke bars, or construction sites, often becoming addicted to drugs and becoming HIV-positive.

  He told his parents that he wanted to help alleviate the poverty in some way. The Akha grew apricots, plums, cherries, peaches, persimmons, vegetables, and a little rice, but none were cash crops. They also grew coffee, but received a pittance for their beans. “I chose coffee as my project,” Lee said, “because it is value-added once you roast it, it is well known in the whole world, and I had noticed that it was growing in popularity in Thailand.”

  After visiting Doi Chang, Doi Tung, and coffeeshops in the lowlands, in March 2010 Lee, then twenty-four, opened the Akha Ama Café in Chiang Mai in order to roast and sell the high-grown beans from his village, beginning with his parents’ harvest. The second year, five other families joined, then twenty households—i.e., most of the village.

  At the time, he didn’t even drink coffee, but he was a fast learner and very ambitious. He gave away free samples to restaurants and cafés in Chiang Mai. He submitted green beans to an international European barista competition, scraping together the 350 Euro submission fee, and was astonished when the Thai coffee was chosen as one to brew for the contest.

  In 2013, Lee visited the United States for the first time, making a pilgrimage to Stumptown Coffee in Portland, Oregon, where he became an eager student of this renowned “third-wave” roaster. “It was one of the best moments in my life to study about coffee at Stumptown. I think I’m the most lucky person in the world. I learned many things from them, especially coffee roasting, cupping, the grading of green coffee beans, wholesale and retail accounts and overall management.” He also learned that processing the beans was an all-important step.

  Back in Chiang Mai, he opened a second coffeehouse. About 40 percent of the customers who drank Akha Ama coffee at the Chiang Mai cafés were farangs seeking a great coffee experience in a foreign land, but the beans were also sold in other coffeehouses, hotels, and restaurants in Bangkok and Phuket and through the company website, akhaama.com.

  Life in the village of Maejantai improved in a few short years. “My motivation is to support those farmers, those families, to be able to come up with a higher quality of life, and to be able to pay for their children to go to school.” He wanted them to be able to “go out into the world and harvest good knowledge and come back.”

  An Akha Meeting

  AFTER CHIANG MAI, I joined Tee Jupoh, the Akha professor I had met at the Doi Chaang festival, and who had agreed to translate for me. We drove north of Chiang Rai to the Meachang District to a meeting of the Association for Akha Education and Culture in Thailand (AFECT). In 1977, Paul Lewis had observed that “the tribal people do not as yet have any organization which brings them together in meetings.” Now they did. The official AFECT meeting would take place in the Vocational Training Hall for Highland People, owned by AFECT and financed by the Japanese Embassy. The room was also used for festivals, conferences, training, and sleeping quarters.

  I met Athu Pochear, the AFECT director, a dynamic, fit man in his forties, who welcomed me warmly. Over an informal dinner, Asawin Jupoh—known as Win, a young man from Saen Charoen, down the mountain from Doi Chang—and another Akha described their recent visit to an Akha village in Laos, two days’ walk from the nearest town, where the villagers still grew opium poppies as their primary cash crop. The villagers were incredibly poor and ate mostly bamboo shoots. “It was like walking back in time fifty years to visit an Akha village in Thailand,” Win said.

  Win, who was related to Tee, grew wild coffee in Saen Charoen, having moved back home to care for his mother. He didn’t know how many rai he had—he just let it grow wild and harvested what he could. He spoke bitterly about Doi Chaang Coffee, saying that Piko’s family was getting rich while keeping the villagers poor. He was also unhappy because Doi Chaang wouldn’t buy his coffee, which was not in the approved GI district. I observed that without Doi Chaang’s success, no one else would be getting good money for their coffee, either. Tee later told me to take Win’s complaints as perhaps “half true.”

  Athu led an animated conversation about how to preserve the Akha way of life. Many Akha villages no longer had people in all of the traditional roles such as the pima, dzoema, and nipah, so he proposed that one of each should be hired to roam among ten villages, and that the fund should also pay for sacrificial water buffalo. Tee didn’t take an active part in the conversation, complaining that it was always big talk but no action.

  In the morning, we moved our sleeping mats and I helped set up tables and displays for the big AFECT meeting that day. Over a hundred people assembled, as Athu showed old videos of traditional Akha village life and a television talk show in which he and Todd Tongdee hosted older Akha playing bamboo flutes and other instruments. At the formal meeting, Athu suggested that AFECT should sponsor roaming pimas and other ritual specialists, but since no one could figure out how to pay for their time or travel expenses, nothing came of it.

  Two Days in Doi Tung

  I LEFT THE AFECT MEETING to catch a ride further north to Doi Tung, the mountain that the elderly Princess Mother had made her project in 1987, and which is now a major tourist destination. Charly Mehl, an American who had lived in Thailand most of his adult life and had worked for the Mae Fah Luang Foundation for twenty years, arranged for my visit and came up from his Bangkok office to be my host. He did much of the research and planning for the impressive Hall of Opium I had visited the previous year, and he had also worked in Doi Tung, so he was greeted fondly by old acquaintances. During my two days there, we visited the coffee processing mill, roasting facility, and café at the bottom of the mountain. Doi Tung Coffee is sold in many Thai grocery stores as well as the Doi Tung Lifestyle shops on the mountain and in Bangkok. We also toured the nearby weaving, pottery, and paper factories. Atop the mountain, we saw many coffee trees and the macadamia nut processing plant, strolled through the beautiful gardens, and toured the home (now museum) of the late Princess Mot
her.

  We also went through the Hall of Inspiration, which tells the history of the royal Mahidol family, including the story of the slum girl who became a nurse, married King Mahidol (a physician), and became the Princess Mother of current King Bhumibol. She was given the nickname Mae Fah Luang, “Royal Mother from the Sky.” Somewhat to my surprise, the hall really was inspiring, including information on royal water projects and interviews with hill tribe members who had been helped by the project.

  Charly Mehl arranged for me to interview two veteran Doi Tung coffee farmers, Saeyo Yangpaingku, sixty-five, an Akha, and Chumporn Apirattachai, eighty-nine, a Lahu. I asked them what it had been like before the Princess Mother arrived. They grew rice, corn, beans, and opium poppies, but there wasn’t enough land for sufficient subsistence food, the trees were mostly gone, and they were caught between various feuding drug warlords. Then the army came and destroyed their poppy fields, leaving them in desperate shape. They tried to hunt for wild pigs or deer, using the M16s or AK47s that were all too prevalent, but the game had disappeared along with the forests.

  So of course they were willing to plant trees for the Princess Mother—it prevented them from starving. Then they worked on the royal coffee plantation and later rented or owned their own coffee trees. “It was good to be paid for our work,” they said, “but much better to be owners.”

  Villagers were issued official Doi Tung IDs, which made them part of the privileged families who could take advantage of the program. To limit population growth and prevent a rush to the area, the project would not allow anyone else to move there permanently. Saeyo’s original Akha village had been right in the middle of the current royal garden, but the village did not have to be moved far. He admitted that he had been an opium addict when the Royal Project started. “I didn’t feel like working, and I had to lie and cheat to get money for opium,” he recalled. So he was glad to be put on the “1000 Day Program,” a strictly enforced opium intervention that lasted nearly three years. Unlike many other such programs, it actually worked much of the time. Chumporn, the Lahu man, never had a drug problem, and at age eighty-nine still harvested some of his own coffee on the steep mountainside. Both men agreed that their lives were better now than before the Royal Project.

  The Mae Fah Luang undertaking at Doi Tung was supposed to be a thirty-year project, slated to end in 2017. It will be interesting to see what kind of transition of power (if any) occurs at that point. It is clear, though, that coffee has helped make a difference in the lives of people on this mountain, as it had in Doi Chang and Huey Hawm.

  Before going back to Doi Chang, we drove along a narrow ridge to another Akha village called Pha Hee, sitting right on the Burmese border. It was set in a steep valley, so that no one could enter except from the top or bottom. Charly Mehl said that the village used to be a well-known smuggling byway for opium, with a cave at the bottom of the valley for hiding the contraband, and it may still be used for illegal methamphetamines coming in from Myanmar. Regardless, its hillsides are now covered with coffee trees, and the eighty-nine households of Pha Hee don’t sell them to Doi Tung but roast their own. I saw their traditional Akha gate, with the carved male and female figures, which had just been replaced.

  I met Kertu Bayche (his Thai name is Aran), the young village headman, who showed me his Phahee Coffee bag, featuring a coffee bean with a stem that looks remarkably like a poppy seedpod, in a sly reference to their former crop. Kertu said they sold their coffee to middlemen or other villages. He had visited Doi Chang, which had partly inspired his efforts.

  Complications in Doi Chang

  I RETURNED TO Doi Chang, where Tee and I visited the health clinic. It had seven employees, including a nurse, nicknamed Puck, and Niwet, the head nurse practitioner. They could stitch people up, but they had to send major cases down the mountain to the hospital in Mae Suai. The clinic offered family planning, pregnancy monitoring, childhood vaccinations, a chronic disease and nutrition clinic, and drug addiction treatment and rehabilitation. The bustling, well-equipped clinic displayed Donated by Doi Chaang Coffee on many pieces of equipment, and the dental chair in one room was part of a container of medical equipment that the Canadian company sponsored, although no dentist yet came to the clinic, and the dental chair remained uninstalled. Nonetheless, it stood in stark contrast to the empty, desolate clinic building seen in the 2010 Global Television documentary.

  Niwet wasn’t there that day. Puck said that undernutrition was no longer a big problem in Doi Chang, but that overeating (especially meat) was leading to more chronic diseases, just as in the developed world. She conducted home visits in the village, mostly to the elderly homebound or postpartum mothers. In the past, the elderly were cared for by their children, but now many children lived elsewhere. Doi Chang was a major hub for drug smugglers, which is why there was an army base there, but addicts were treated in strict confidence. Health care was free to anyone with a Thai ID, but there was a small charge to immigrants without identification papers.

  Later, Miga, Nuda, Dawan, Lipi, and I had a lively discussion about the Akha way of life. Miga was contemptuous of the written form of the Akha language, which she said was only created so that missionaries could translate the Bible. I protested that the language might be lost otherwise, and that the written version could be used to write down Akha legends, many of which she and Adel had never heard, but which I had read in a book by Paul Lewis. She insisted that Akha was an oral tradition and should not be written. I said that I worried that the old customs might be lost, that the Akha language itself might be lost as Thai culture invaded Doi Chang. She shrugged, implying, That’s just the way things go. Lipi interjected that he hated missionaries, who tried to force their ideas into your head.

  We talked about traditional Akha medicinal herbs, which they all believed could work. Leebang, the man with a limp, was badly hurt in a motorcycle accident, and rubbing herbs on his leg made him much better. They joked that they could cut me and show me how they could cure me. They said that Akong, the master roaster, kept an herb garden outside the Academy of Coffee and was a great healer. There is a place in the village where there is a hole with magic healing earth, which you could roast and consume to cure what ails you. Nuda later took me to see this red clay, dug out just off the main road, but I never got to roast and eat it.

  They also said that there were rituals and chants, and then the healer would blow breath on the hurt place. This was not just a pima who did this, but any older family member who knew the proper chants and methods. I asked about shamans, and yes, they have them, and yes, they go into a trance to see your tree of life and how it is doing.

  They confirmed that in an Akha wedding, they throw rice and dung. The idea of the dung is that a couple will withstand together the worst that life can bring. But when I asked about the courting yard, Miga insisted that it was only a story made up to show how promiscuous Akha girls supposedly were. The Akha village elders, however, confirmed that it had existed, but was now a rarely used ceremonial area. Young people no longer sang, danced, and flirted there. They were too busy in school or watching television.

  After that meeting, Tee and I visited Agui Chermui, the chief pima, in his village home. His was a traditional Akha home, with an ancestor shrine hanging in a corner of the women’s half of the house. Agui was very proud that he is one of only three pimas in Thailand who can sacrifice as many as three water buffaloes and one horse at a funeral for an important deceased Akha.

  I also spoke with former headman Beno’s daughter-in-law, Atum. She was an Ulo Akha from another village. She had three children, all of whom were being raised as Lisu, and she had essentially lost her own Akha identity and culture, since she lived on the upper Lisu side of the road. She knew of nine other Lisu-Akha couples in Doi Chang—all Lisu husbands with Akha wives. Akha women are known as hard workers and good mothers. I asked Atum if she missed the Akha Way, but she just said, “The husband is the head of the family, and a wife must follow.”
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  Then we visited the current village headman, Aja, who was elected in 2010. On call twenty-four hours a day for any village crisis, he earned a salary of 8,000 baht per month ($270). Typically, he would adjudicate border disputes, since there are no official boundaries or even legal ownership. But only one case in four years had gone to the courts. I asked whether some kind of zoning regulations might be necessary, with the explosive growth in the village. Aja said there was already a kind of zoning—there was a community forest, farming fields, and an area for houses. But no one would dare suggest further zoning restrictions.

  Aja admitted that addiction and gambling were sometimes problems and that the money from coffee had exacerbated them. Akha men would start with Ya Ba and then go on to heroin addiction. He was concerned that the traditional Akha way of life was eroding, but this was a new generation, and they had a choice. You could not force anything on them. You could not take away computers and television sets.

  Aja also owned 40 rai and grew coffee. He processed his own beans and sold them in parchment to roasters in Chiang Mai, Bangkok, and elsewhere. I asked why he didn’t sell to Doi Chaang Coffee, and his face clouded. He then told me that he was one of nine Akha who formed a kind of cooperative back when Wicha and Adel were growing the Doi Chaang Coffee business. Each of the nine was responsible for processing coffee cherries from a group of farmers, then delivering the beans to be roasted for sale by Doi Chaang. For this service, the processors had received 2 baht per kilo.