Beyond Fair Trade

by Mark Pendergrast

  It certainly wasn’t quiet the next morning, when I was awakened at precisely 5 a.m. by a cacophony of amazingly vehement roosters, one of whom seemed to be a few feet from my bed. They inspired various dogs to join in the chorus. That morning, after breakfast, I walked down to a Protestant church for what I thought would be a 9:30 a.m. service, but no one was there. Instead, I heard distant singing and traced it to a valley far below to the right, where I could see people walking along a trail. I made my way down dirt roads and paths and found a small Akha Easter service underway in a clearing in the woods. There were about forty people from all generations gathered around a wooden cross, and a young minister presiding in the middle. An older Akha woman chewing betel nut sat near me. One little girl sat in the crotch of a tree, and a teenaged boy wore a baseball hat that said Obama on it.

  A man holding a hymnal invited me to sit next to him on a makeshift bamboo-pole bench, and he pointed to the words as he sang. The hymnal must have been the work of Paul Lewis, because I could actually read the Akha words phonetically, so I sang along. Then some teens sang a song with guitars. The minister read John 20 from the Akha Bible, in which Mary Magdalene discovers the empty tomb, then gave a lively commentary on it. The service wasn’t nearly as formal as the Catholic mass the previous evening. At the end, everyone got a glass of water or Sprite and a red hardboiled egg, which is another spillover from traditional Akha culture, though it reminded me of Easter egg hunts.

  On the way back to the resort, I thought about the impact of religion on the Akha. Their traditional belief system is complex and evolved over centuries to fit their lives in the mountains, explaining life and death, honoring the ancestors, celebrating the seasons and harvests, placating the spirits. Their rituals helped maintain balance and gave meaning to everything they did. Now, in the space of a few decades, that way of life was nearly gone, and in its place were these imposed forms of Christianity and Buddhism. Yet they, too, had their beauty and rituals, and the Akha had made them their own in many ways.

  Chome and Beno

  BEFORE OUR INTERVIEW back at her resort, Chome showed me her thesis, “Lisu Women’s Identity and Self Over Three Generations: A Case Study of the Life Experience of a Lisu Woman,” for her master’s degree in Women’s Studies at Chiang Mai University, in which she concluded that “these complex constructed identities have resulted in inconsistencies in these women’s concepts of self, [which are] fragmented and fluid.” She also showed me her handbook from the Economic Empowerment Fellows Program, sponsored by the Maureen and Mike Mansfield Center at the University of Montana in Missoula, where she would be going in October. She had e-mailed me that she also hoped to learn from American coffee roasters.

  Chome was born in 1967, the third of five siblings. As a little girl, she helped her mother harvest opium from their small field up the mountain. When she was nine, her father enrolled her in a Christian school in Chiang Rai, and though she never converted, she attended a series of Christian schools until she studied bookkeeping in college. She only visited Doi Chang sporadically, usually for the rice ceremony in August or the Lisu New Year in January or February. When she came home for a visit as a young teen, she discovered that a few Akha families had moved to Doi Chang, and it seemed that with every subsequent visit, more Akha relations had joined them.

  Chome never married. “I was too shy, because I didn’t grow up in the community,” she said. “My mother sewed me a nice dress and my grandmother gave me a lot of silver jewelry.” But no husband courted her or was willing to pay for her bride price. After college, she met Dutch anthropologist Leo Alting von Geusau, who hired her in 1991 as a bookkeeper for his Mountain Peoples Cultural Education and Development Foundation, later renamed Inter Mountain Peoples Education and Culture in Thailand Association (IMPECT).

  She worked at IMPECT in Chiang Mai until returning to live in Doi Chang in 2009, as the coffee boom was building. Her father gave his oldest son Bancha 25 rai of land, Chome and her brother Charlie 10 rai each, and her younger brother and sister smaller amounts. Before she arrived, they called their brand Ban Doi Chang Coffee, an obvious attempt to ride on the success of the Doi Chaang packages. “It is our community, so it is a name anyone can use.” Then they created the Lisu Coffee brand in 2010 and began roasting their own beans the following year. After discovering that some Lisu in other villages used the same name, they registered the Doi Mork brand, “mork” meaning cloudy and overcast, as the mountains often are. Chome then decided to switch yet again to Abeno Coffee, with a picture of her father on the package.

  Chome had also founded a Lisu women’s group, which had grown to twenty women, including a few Akha and one Chinese, and had taken them to IMPECT meetings in Chiang Mai. Finally, she had begun the Doi Chang Resort and restaurant, and she owned the small grocery store across the main street.

  I asked Chome what she thought of Wicha and Doi Chaang Coffee, and she immediately bristled. “Mr. Wicha was too strong in his talk,” she said, adding that he had alienated not only the Lisu but some of the Akha. She admitted that “Doi Chaang Coffee has done some amazing things for the community,” but she added, “they say it is the people’s company, but they run it with just their group.” Of Adel and Miga she commented, “They can continue and learn.” Despite her interest in learning more about the coffee industry, she had so far not attended the free classes at the Academy of Coffee. Her big challenge was how to attract more people to her resort. From November to January, quite a few Thai tourists stayed there, but customers were scarce the rest of the year. More tourists seemed to be finding their way up the mountain, but they only visited the Doi Chaang Coffee complex, the first inviting place they came to. Chome somehow needed to encourage them to drive further down the mountain, into the village.

  Then, at his home nearby, we interviewed Beno, her father, and I met Amima, her mother, though she didn’t talk much. Yes, Beno had first brought coffee seedlings to the village in 1977, but many had been killed by coffee leaf rust, and there was no profit in it. Beno remembered the 1985 army raid that destroyed the opium, and the subsequent public ceremony to burn opium paraphernalia. He confirmed that my understanding of the background history of Doi Chang was accurate. Many Lisu had been very angry when the agricultural research station took over so much land up the mountain, where they had grown poppies, but Beno approved of the takeover, saying that it would “promote good things,” that they needed to know about macadamia and coffee. Yet neither the Department of Agriculture nor the Thai-Germans had taught them how to market their products.

  Chiang Mai Interlude

  IN CHIANG MAI, the big city three hours to the south, Nong, the cordyceps lady, kindly offered to be my guide and act as my translator. My first stop in Chiang Mai was the Payap University Archives, a Thai Baptist institution that housed the papers of Paul Lewis, the missionary anthropologist. I found fascinating material he had written about the Akha in the 1970s, leading up to the time when the first Akha moved to Doi Chang. Here are excerpts from Lewis’s observations in 1976 and 1977:

  [Thai government agents] sometimes use visits to the tribal village as an excuse to get lots to drink, smoke, and eat—and the smoking includes opium. They are not above extortion in opium-related matters, or outright thieving.

  When there are large caravans of opium traders from Burma moving through Akha country, the Akhas are wise enough not to even go near these heavily armed semi-military units. The modern weapons they carry… were provided originally to “fight Communism,” but now are used to make a “killing” in opium…

  There may be some changes which are overdue, however, such as coming to have respect for women as human beings. The Akha society is highly male-dominated. I recently met two Akha women who had been forced to leave their village during the time of the ancestor offering, since they were divorced and had no “male” through which they could be related to the ancestors. They were really put in an extremely difficult position…

  Akhas are at the bottom
of the socio-economic ladder, which might be partly related to the fact that they are the newest tribal group to migrate to Thailand. Akhas are finding themselves forced into contact with non-Akhas in Thailand more often and more intimately than ever before. This is due primarily to the related factors of population explosion and a lack of adequate land for cultivation…

  Akhas tend to be poor, sick, and culturally innervated. Akha culture is hanging by a thread. There are still many very fine Akhas in every village, however, who are anxious for a better day to come. For various reasons they seem to feel that they themselves will not see that better day, but at least they want it for their children…

  Akhas, as a tribe, are suffering the general effects of the pressure to change, which is very strong and broad. The rate and quantity of change which is going on around them is surprising and unsettling to most of them, who tend to want to move back more closely into the womb of their culture and let the rest of the change swirl by them—but they have found the current is too strong and they cannot get back to that particular womb…

  If the day comes when the Akha children might have one or two years of preliminary instruction in their own language, I would hope that many of the Akha proverbs and stories could be written down and used in the teaching. But my own feeling regarding this perplexing problem is that the Akhas themselves will have to deal with it in their own time and in their own way…

  Thais and foreigners have no idea how intelligent some of the tribal people can be… Since the tribal people do not as yet have any organization which brings them together in meetings, something must be worked out to see that leaders from each tribe can meet together regularly… Just give the tribal people a chance, and over a period of time they will develop the needed skills to come to logical and workable conclusions as they discuss various problems…

  Perhaps the most hopeful [opium replacement] crop is coffee. I have been pushing this for some time with Lahus, but feel now that an extra push needs to be given to all tribes, including the Akhas, who always seem to be so far behind the other groups…

  Paul Lewis came across as a decent, thoughtful man who had tried his best to help all of the hill tribes, especially the Akha. And the incredible coffee success in Doi Chang made Lewis look prescient, although some of the problems he wrote about nearly forty years ago remained, even as I read about them in the Payap University Archives. Akha culture was still hanging by a thread, and the old folktales were being lost, perhaps along with the language. Still, strong-minded young women like Miga, Nuda, and Chome were evidence that some things had changed for the better, along with better health care, sanitation, and a sustainable income from coffee.

  During my stay in Chiang Mai, I was able to interview several people, including Lamar Robert, an American economist who had spent most of his career in Thailand as a consultant, including work for the Thai-German Highland Development Project in Doi Chang in the 1980s. He recalled that when he first went to Doi Chang in 1984, “the main road had beautiful multicolored poppy blossoms on both sides.” In Doi Chang he attended a 1986 meeting to introduce coffee cultivation in which “the emphasis was not on how much money could be made from coffee, but rather on what a demanding crop it is to produce and how it requires special attention.” He did not recall any effort to help with marketing the coffee for a decent price. Robert’s impression was that in Doi Chang, “the Akha were like the poor stepchildren, who had to move to this location, and out of the kindness of their hearts the Lisu let them move there. I didn’t see anyone really taken advantage of, but it was obvious who was the guest, who was the owner.”

  At his home, where he kept beautiful songbirds and cultivated bonsai trees, I also interviewed Bandid Jangnam, the first director of the Wawi Highland Agricultural Research Station in Doi Chang. He showed me a slide show of his early days in Doi Chang in the 1980s—burned-over fields, opium poppies, a truck stuck in a muddy road. He had previously worked at a district office and remembered his colleagues telling him not to take the job in Doi Chang, which was known as a violent drug outpost. When the agricultural station confiscated the land, “the villagers wanted to kill me,” but he became friends with Beno, the headman, and took him to the hospital when someone shot him in the hip. At first, when they gave the farmers coffee seedlings, “they didn’t want them,” he said. “Coffee leaf rust was a big problem.” They had more success when rust-resistant Catimor was introduced. The Akha were relative newcomers and had less land, and so they were more willing to work for wages at the agricultural station.

  In 1987, Bandid and his wife, Wiangjan, had bought a small roaster and created what was essentially the first Doi Chang coffee brand. Their daughter Pop remembered helping her mother iron the aluminum bags shut. They abandoned the small roasting project because they could sell only a few bags to friends, but Bandid showed no resentment about not having been part of the local coffee boom.

  Bandid retired in 1993. Prasong Munsalong, his first assistant, was now the head of the Wawi station. Prasong, whose home is also in Chiang Mai, was there for this interview as well, and I saw him again when I went back to Doi Chang. Perhaps because he is still employed, Prasong was much more circumspect in his few remarks to me, though there was an interesting photo of him in Doi Chang as a much younger man, sitting in a bamboo hut and holding a rifle.

  As the interview ended, Nong brought Jacques Op de Laak, who also lived in Chiang Mai, though he had not seen Bandid and Prasong in years. We drove with Jacques up Doi Suthep, the mountain towering over the city, to visit the high, remote Coffee Research Centre of Chiang Mai University. From 1983 until 1992, the Dutch agronomist had worked there when it was called the Highland Coffee Research and Development Centre, and where he developed the rust-resistant Catimor coffee in the experimental fields. As we strolled the fields, Jacques showed us signs of rust on the older Catimor. The rust was apparently adapting to it. “This is why they are working on a new strain.”

  Back down the mountain, we went to see anthropologist Otome Hutheesing. Now age eighty-four, Otome verified much of what she had written in her book about Doi Lan. Mostly, I talked with Mimi Saeju, thirty-three, a Lisu woman who lived with and cared for Otome and her long-time partner, Michael Vickery, a retired American teacher. Mimi spoke excellent English. She moved from Doi Lan when she was seven to go to school and, though she never returned to live there full-time, she has kept in close touch with her parents and other villagers.

  Mimi and Otome both expressed deep concern about the situation in Doi Lan. In the 1980s, a Thai general bought a large piece of land in the village and established a coffee plantation, which infuriated the Lisu, some of whom were paid a pittance to work there. After someone tried to shoot him, the general fled, but he left an anti-coffee legacy among the villagers. Now the success of Doi Chaang Coffee had driven up the price of land in Doi Lan, and few natives could afford to buy it. Consequently, many lived in poverty or had to go to Korea for menial jobs. Mimi’s sister, for instance, worked in a Korean leather bag factory for three months. Another big problem, she said, was that Lisu women in their forties, too old to make a living as prostitutes anymore, had returned to Doi Lan in desperate poverty. Some had turned to drug dealing. AIDS was still a big hidden problem.

  It was clearly painful for Otome to hear these sad stories about life in Doi Lan, the village whose initial disruption she had documented in the 1980s. I asked what might be done, and she shrugged, helpless. She had no easy answers.

  Huey Hawm, a Karen Coffee Village

  MY NEXT JOURNEY was a five-hour drive west to Huey Hawm in Mae Hong Son Province. My driver, Richard Mann, then twenty-seven, was the grandson of the Richard “Dick” Mann who pioneered coffee cultivation in Thailand fifty years ago, in Huey Hawm. So I was going to origin, so to speak. ITDP coffee manager Boonchu Kloedu came along.

  Huey Hawm was a charming, isolated mountain village. Like Boonchu, the 380 villagers were Karen tribal members, most of whom had been born there. The native nam
e for the village is Chawti, which means “elephant” in Karen, so it, like Doi Chang, was named for the elephants that once roamed those mountains. The farmers gathered eagerly as Boonchu gave out partial payment for this year’s coffee harvest. According to Richard, they would use the money to pay for items such as propane, a motorcycle or car, repair work, building materials such as roofing or teak, and food supplements such as salt. Otherwise, they were nearly self-sufficient. Each family processed its own coffee cherries.

  Below the houses, in the valley, I could see rice paddies and sheep grazing next to fishponds. As a young man, Dick Mann had introduced sheep to the village, which is now one of the few places in Thailand that makes and sells domestic woolen clothing. Mann also encouraged fish farming, and ITDP set up a revolving fund for interest-free loans to villagers.

  On the surrounding forested mountainsides, shade-grown coffee grew on about 500 rai (200 acres). Above the village is a spring with a water filtration system and concrete storage tank, which Starbucks had paid for in 2004, when the giant roaster began buying coffee beans from the village. The Starbucks purchase was a turning point for coffee in the village. Thalu, a wizened ninety-four-year-old, commented, “I remember when your grandfather [Dick Mann] told us not to cut down the coffee trees, when the price was so low. He said the time would come when coffee would sell better, and when Starbucks came, that happened.” Thalu praised the Manns for coming back regularly through the years, unlike other charities, which is why the missionary organization is respected and why the villagers are Christians.