by Jane Goodall
Our program started when I heard that really good quality coffee was being grown in the high hills outside the park but that the farmers were not getting good prices due to their lack of marketing skills and lack of infrastructure. And, just about the same time, I received an invitation to give a keynote talk at the annual meeting of the Specialty Coffee Association of America. This was an unusual request—it seemed that it was meant to be!
I gave myself a crash course in coffee growing and its environmental impacts, learning about the benefits of shade-grown and organic coffee farming. The meeting took place in Seattle, and my talk went really well.
At the end I said, “I believe we have a source of first-rate coffee around Gombe National Park. But I need some of you guys to come and taste it—and if it is good, buy it, create a specialty brand, give the farmers a good price, and help the environment and the chimpanzees in the bargain!”
That was why, within a month, a small group of senior executives from Green Mountain Coffee Roasters arrived in Kigoma, visited some of the coffee farmers, tasted the coffee, pronounced it excellent, and ordered a couple of crates. And that, in turn, led to a delicious coffee, which they market as “Tanzanian Gombe Reserve.” The farmers got a better price than they had dreamed of—and, too, it helped to ensure a better future for the chimpanzees of Gombe.
Other roasters also came, tasted, and bought. With advice from experts, production per acre has greatly increased, and trees are being planted to provide shade, help control erosion, and restore moisture to the soil. This coffee is now regarded as the best in Tanzania, and last year the farmers were able to produce some four hundred tons.
The first time I went to the coffee-growing area high in the hills above Lake Tanganyika was to visit, with a small group of VIPs, one of the farmers, Lazaro Shaonansia. He had joined our Roots & Shoots program when he was a child in primary school, where he learned about TACARE and the importance of trees. He told us that he had inherited his tiny coffee farm when his uncle died and at that time he had found it a depressing place. It was on a bare hillside, with a few sick “and sad-looking” coffee bushes, no trees, and all the animals and birds gone.
However, remembering his R&S training, the first thing Lazaro did was to plant some tree seedlings. Nature here is resilient. The trees grew. The ground, once shaded, regained moisture. And now his coffee plants look healthy, and surely “happy,” laden with red “cherries” almost ready for picking. And now they are surrounded by trees, some of which are thirty feet tall or more. Lazaro told us that birds and small animals are coming back too. I was glad to be there with Lazaro, for he is dynamic, full of life and energy. And hope for the future.
After leaving him we drove a short way, then walked in the cool highland air, past a little boy herding huge-horned Ankole-Watusi cattle, and through another, longer-established coffee farm. In between the slightly “untidy” rows—because the plants each have their own individual growth patterns—banana plants were growing, and looking equally healthy and providing much-needed food. Here and there were tall Grevillea robusta trees, which not only provide shade but also fix nitrogen in the soil, helping both bananas and coffee. (Four other tree species found on other farms do the same job.)
An old man was weeding the bushes. He seemed amazed to see us—he said he was just doing what he always did, and yet suddenly there were all these people taking photos of him. He was tickled pink, wreathed in smiles.
Close by was one of the “washing” operations of the region’s coffee cooperative, where farmers such as Lazaro bring their harvest to be weighed, checked for quality, and entered in a logbook. The pulp surrounding the beans is cleaned in one machine, and all the waste goes as fertilizer to nearby fields. The wet, clean beans are then laid on giant drying racks. We saw the huge shed where the dried beans are stored before they are sorted and graded.
Once the farmer hands over his coffee, he no longer owns it—it becomes the property of the cooperative—which was why, at first, many farmers were reluctant to join the scheme. But the difference in price between the beans that they could individually offer for sale and the beans that had been cleaned and dried according to specific standards, then sorted and graded, was so great that soon more and more farmers were joining.
The headquarters of the cooperative is in the large building that houses the giant machine that cleans, sorts, and grades the dry beans. We learned that it was purchased with a loan that had to be paid back in five years. The scheme was so successful they were able to pay it back in just two years—they are justly proud. They are proud, too, of their certificates: five years running they won the prize for Best Quality from the Tanzanian Coffee Board, and one year they got second prize.
Our Tanzanian coffee farmers have formed a cooperative. They bring their harvest to be cleaned, sun dried on these huge racks, then graded for quality. They get their share of profit only after the coffee has been sold. (CREDIT: © THE JANE GOODALL INSTITUTE / BY JENNIFER CROFT)
This is a perfect example of successful production on a moderately large scale involving small family farmers rather than a big commercial operation. The current tally is fourteen hundred farmers, and the average size of each farm is an acre, with only one or two being as large as several acres. And because each farmer grows other crops scattered throughout and between the coffee-growing areas, they can still support their families even when the market price of coffee drops during a given year.
Tea: The British “Cuppa”
Now what about tea? It is made, of course, by adding hot water to the dried leaves of Camellia sinensis, and we Brits are known to be a nation of tea drinkers. My sister and I were given a doll’s tea set when we were children—it was almost a mandatory gift for little girls back then, and it is still popular today. Tea was the first “grown-up” drink we were allowed—very weak and milky—long before coffee was permitted (we couldn’t get coffee during the war anyway). In England, a cup of tea is a panacea for all ills. If you have a shock, a good strong cup of tea with plenty of sugar will steady you. If you are cold, a cuppa will warm you. If you are hot, a cuppa will cool you down.
My most favorite tea story I read in a small paragraph in a newspaper about eight years ago. A burglar was chased by three policemen, who finally caught him in an elderly lady’s back garden in London. Two policemen sat on their captive while the third called for a car. The old lady came into her garden and stared in astonishment. Turning to the only solution she knew, she asked the policemen if they would like a cup of tea.
“You bet,” they said, exhausted from the chase. The woman set off, then turned back and, looking doubtfully at the prostrate burglar, she asked, “Should I bring three cups—or four?” (She was told that three would suffice!)
Camellia sinensis is native to China. (There is another species, Assam tea—Camellia sinensis var. assamica—which grows in India, but this was not cultivated until very much later.) The discovery of tea in China is surrounded in mystery. However, according to legend, it was “discovered” around 2700 BC by the Chinese ruler Shen Nung, an herbal medicine practitioner known variously as the “Divine Harvester,” the “Divine Peasant,” and the “Divine Healer.” As the story goes, he was very concerned about cleanliness and only drank boiled water. One day he apparently stopped to take a nap beneath a tree with a bowl of freshly boiled water beside him. A tea-tree leaf fluttered down into his bowl. He chose to drink the water anyway and was filled with an overwhelming sense of well-being. And that was the moment tea was born.
Although countless people still derive great pleasure from a cup of tea, it is unfortunate that unless they are drinking an organic brand, the brew is likely to be contaminated with a mix of chemicals. This is because most tea plantations rely on heavy spraying of chemicals to control pests and weeds. Many of these chemicals are highly toxic, and some are even banned for agricultural purposes in the United States and other Western countries. I also discovered that workers are supposed to be well trained to ha
ndle these chemicals and wear protective gear, such as aprons and rubber boots, yet all too often the workers are untrained and simply wear shorts and no shoes.
It’s not just the workers but also the distant consumers who are at risk of chemical exposure—the first time you “wash” the leaves is when you brew the tea to drink it. I was shocked to learn all this. The good old British “cuppa” suddenly did not seem such a good idea after all. At least, not unless it is an organic brand, and fortunately there are some great brands on the market.
Not only does organic tea better protect the health of consumers and workers, it also benefits the health of all living beings. Compared to a chemical-dependent tea field, an organic one hosts 44 percent more birds in the autumn and winter, has 57 percent more animal species, and has five times more wild plants.
Of course, the use of agricultural chemicals is not the only problem—thousands and thousands of square miles of tropical forest have been destroyed in India and China for tea plantations. Thus, I was excited to discover that it is possible to harvest tea—like coffee—from trees growing in the forest.
I first heard about this from Joshua Kaiser, founder and president of Rishi Tea, one of the companies that sources Fair Trade and organic certified tea from around the world. Joshua and his staff have personally visited many of the places to verify the conditions for themselves. One of the villages is Mannong Manmai in Yunnan Province, China. There 250 families have entered a Fair Trade Organic Co-op and contract with Rishi Tea to produce organic teas from a sustainable and biologically diverse environment. The tea is harvested from an old-growth tea forest established by ancient tea planters more than fifteen hundred years ago, and to pick the leaves, the local women climb into the trees.
These people protect their ancient tea forest fiercely, and have done so for generation after generation. No toxic chemicals, clear-cutting of trees, weeding, or soil-erosion-promoting actions are permitted in an ancient tea forest. Many of the tea trees are between five hundred and eight hundred years old, and some are thought to have lived for over a thousand years.
Before leaving the subject of tea, I must say that I am really grateful to those farmers and entrepreneurs who have taken the high moral ground and developed an organic tea standard. And especially to businesses such as Rishi Tea. Because it means that, without feeling guilt, I can once again enjoy a good old British cuppa.
Cacao—Food of the Gods
Chocolate!
Probably I am so addicted to chocolate because, during World War II, it was severely rationed. Just a few squares per week—which the grown-ups sacrificed for us children. And it really was a sacrifice for my mother—she was, I think, even more of a chocoholic than me, due, I suspect, to the deprivation of the war years. When I was spending months on end at Gombe, chocolate was one of the things I missed most, and everyone who came on a visit knew to bring me a supply.
Chocolate comes from the beans of Theobroma cacao, a tree that can grow to the size of a big apple tree. It matures when it is three years old and from then on, during its life of more than fifty years, continuously flowers and produces seeds all the year round. These seeds, the size of almonds, are surrounded by soft white pulp inside pods that, in some species, can be the size of footballs and that are attached to the trunk of the tree. There are twenty to sixty seeds per pod, and it takes fifteen to thirty pods to make two pounds of cacao.
Theobroma cacao is indigenous to Mexico, Central America, and northern South America. Christopher Columbus was probably the very first European to set eyes on cacao beans, during his fourth and last voyage to the Americas. It was when he was sailing near what is now Honduras that he encountered the biggest native boat he had ever seen. He described it as being as long as a galley and eight feet wide, with twenty-five paddlers beneath a palm roof. Among the exotic fruits and other goods for trade were cacao beans. And he noticed the extreme value the natives placed on these “almonds,” as he called them, since they so quickly gathered any that fell to the ground.
Indeed, cacao was a sacred plant for the Mayans. It was commonly associated with the afterlife—perhaps because the liquid was dyed with achiote, a red-colored spice, and looked like blood—and was used in weddings and other important ceremonies. Even the Aztecs believed that the Creator had given them the tree and that it was the most important for the life force. This was probably why Linnaeus, when naming it, combined the Greek words theo, meaning “god,” and broma, meaning “food,” with the Olmec name cacao—Theobroma cacao, “food of the gods.”
The bean preparation is much the same as coffee, save that the cacao beans, when separated, are fermented before drying, roasting, and grinding. The result of these processes is known as chocolate liquor, which is bitter and sold in blocks.
Once the Europeans discovered the value of cacao, they established plantations in some of their African colonies. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s cacao growing increased in West Africa, especially in Ivory Coast. Unfortunately for the environment, a great deal of rain forest was cleared—and this was unfortunate for the cacao trees too, since in their original habitat, under the shade of the forest, they can live to be fifty years old, but out in the sun they age faster and become nonproductive after thirty years.
As well, farmers often had to use a great deal of chemical spray to try to control the main problem with growing cacao in Africa, black pod disease (which has been compared to the Irish potato famine). As the land in Ivory Coast became less fertile, farmers simply cut more forest down to start over again—or else left their impoverished land to seek work in the towns.
In the Cameroons, however, a more environmentally friendly method of production emerged—the cacao trees were allowed to grow in the shade of some of the original rain forest, and a mixture of other species were planted for fruit or timber. It was an environment rich in biodiversity, and the soil remained fertile.
Then, in the 1990s, cacao prices fell on the international market. The Cameroonian farmers, unable to make a living by selling cacao, turned to maize, groundnuts, or oil palm, often clearing pristine rain forest. In Ivory Coast the desperate cacao farmers, in an effort to reduce their costs, resorted to exactly the same solution as that of the original European plantation owners—slaves and forced child labor.
Most of them were lured from impoverished Mali, told that they would be able to earn money to help their families. In fact, they were seldom paid anything and were mostly treated with extreme brutality. An investigation found that on a typical small farm, working hours were 6:00 a.m. to 6.30 p.m., the food provided was minimal, and the boys were often locked up at night to prevent them from running away.
At the time of the investigation there were some six hundred thousand small farms in the country, using roughly fifteen thousand children. When a child did escape, he reported his captor—the other slaves were then rescued and sent home. And once the international media began publicizing the situation, there was general outrage and additional inspections, and things improved.
Meanwhile consumers were beginning to understand more about the origin of their purchases. The Fair Trade label had been launched in 1988, bringing a lot of publicity to the issue in general. In 1994 Green & Black’s (now owned by Kraft Foods) sold their Maya Gold chocolate, sourced in Belize, under a Fair Trade label. Gradually other brands have followed suit.
It was also in 1994 that Joe Whinney, founder of Theo Chocolate, first pioneered the importation of organic cacao beans into North America. After witnessing the degradation of the tropical rain forests and the economic hardship endured by the workers, Joe became passionate about creating a more sustainable form of cacao growing, one that went beyond the organic label’s requirements. He realized that it wasn’t enough to teach cacao farmers about the advantages of long-term habitat protection. Unless the standard of living for the farmers, and especially their workers, was improved, the supply of cacao could never be sustainable. Theo started its program to improve things for these people at ab
out the time that our TACARE program began in Tanzania.
Once JGI learned about Theo Chocolate, which prides itself in being the first “bean-to-bar” organic and Fair Trade for Life chocolate manufacturer in North America, we arranged a visit to their Seattle factory. Of course, being a lover of chocolate, it was a memorable experience for me. The mouthwatering smell of good chocolate, the abundance of bars and confections for sampling, and the chocolate-flavored story of the company’s operations in Africa nurtured both body and soul.
Theo has suppliers/farmers in Latin America, who have now enjoyed fifteen years of good, reliable income. They are protecting their forest environment and, knowing they have now created a sustainable environment, they are even planting hardwoods (which take many years to mature) as investments in their children’s future—just as we are doing in Tanzania.
In Africa, Joe offers technical training and assistance to farmers about becoming certified as organic. This kind of information is eagerly sought after. He told me he ends up speaking in the largest spaces they can provide—schools and churches—and they are always packed.
When he asks his audiences why they have come, they often reply, “Because we want to grow cacao without chemicals. Whenever we grow with chemicals, we get sick. And we can’t afford the doctor’s bills.”
Fortunately Joe can inform his farmers about organic solutions to common problems from pod-boring insects. The neem tree’s leaves, munched by my son for protection against malaria (see chapter 10), have antibacterial properties. The tree produces many seeds, and if these are collected and soaked in water, the resulting liquid becomes a natural pesticide that can be sprayed on the cacao trees.