The Nicaraguan Coffee Harvest

If it were not for Folgers Coffee, I might have never have graduated from college. Long nights in the TCU library and engineering building, working on projects and studying for tests, would have been a lost cause if it were not for a steady stream of strong black caffeine to keep my eyes open. However, I must admit, not once did I question how that coffee got to Texas and into my little white styrofoam cup. I did not even know what a coffee plant looked like. However, after almost two years in Nicaragua, I have come to have an intimate relationship with those little black beans.

In the months of November and December, the coffee harvest starts gearing up in Central America. Thousands upon thousands of migrant workers abandon their homes and families, load themselves into the back of trucks normally used to transport cattle or agriculture, and head off to mountains. Coffee is a plant that must be grown at high altitudes and in cool climates, and the highest mountains of tropical Central America produce some of the best coffee in the world. Harvesting that coffee is an extremely labor intensive process, with the larger farms employing over a thousand pickers at a time, and extending for more than a thousand acres. Everyday these pickers wake up early in the morning, strap a basket to their waist, and head off into the mountains to spend the day filling their basket with small red berries.

This November, as I was working in one of the plantain farms in my village, a coworker asked me if I wanted to pick coffee this year. A farm located in the mountains of Pacific Nicaragua was coming to our pueblo to pick up workers. The harvest had started, and they were in need of labor. The offer was enticing, I must admit. Not that there is any great amount of money to be made picking coffee, but I had spent the majority of the year working in plantain farms and was starting to get restless. The following Sunday, I and ten others from my village slid into the back of a truck, each of us with a backpack filled with only a few changes of clothes, and headed off for the mountains.

In one sense, the coffee harvest is a beautiful thing. Coffee must be grown in the shade, so instead of chopping the forest to the ground in order to plant, the majority of the trees are left standing. Only the undergrowth is cleared, and row upon row of coffee saplings are sewn into the ground. As the fruit begins to grown and ripen, each plant is loaded with small, bright berries, painting the fields in yellow and red. In the early morning dawn, as the sun is starting to rise, pickers follow small trails through the mountains to reach the area where they will be working that day. They walk underneath the shade of giant Ceiba, Chilamate, and Cedro trees, often with howler monkeys dancing throughout the canopy above. It is not uncommon to see a baby monkey clinging on to the back of its mom, as she swings through the trees looking for some fruit to eat. The air is fresh and cool, and many of the pickers wear long sleeved shirts to keep the cold away. Almost everyone arrives at the coffee farms with friends or family, and at the beginning of each day, each group of pickers is assigned an area to work. As everyone slowly advances down their designated row, picking the ripened berries of each coffee plant as quickly as possible, they talk with the each other, discussing their plans for Christmas or how much coffee they hope to pick that day. Some are faster than others are, so when one finishes with his or her row, they go to help those who pick more slowly. In some ways, it is tranquil work with your friends and family, but there are downsides as well.

Picking the ripe coffee beans.

In tropical climates, the mountains are associated with rain. Depending on the region the coffee farm is located in, it can rain either just a few days out of the week, or virtually every day. But the owners and foreman are not interested in the weather; they are interested only in the profit. Many of the days that I spent picking coffee were accompanied by a steady rain throughout the day, often soaking you to the bone. Some people would pour the water out of their rubber boots at the end of each row of coffee. At night, we would hang our clothes on whatever we could find in the dormitories, and hope they would not still be soaking wet in the morning when we had to put them back on again and go to work.

The dorms are another less than appealing aspect of the coffee harvest. The farm I picked coffee at had three main buildings for the workers to sleep in. One was a large room crammed with as many three-story wooden bunk beds as it could possibly fit, with a narrow walkway in between the rows of bunks. That dorm would be filled with over 150 people depending on how good the harvest was that year. There were no mattresses, and the one blanket each of us brought to the camp was not always sufficient to keep the cold night air away. Some say sleeping on a hard flat surface is good for one's posture, but I can tell you from experience it is not beneficial for a getting a good nights sleep. Those of us in that dorm, though, were the lucky ones. One of the other dorms, had only two-story bunk beds, and not quite as many crammed into the room. These bunks beds, though, were made of steel, and if I did not get a good nights sleep laying on wooden planks, I can imagine how poorly they slept on a mattress of steel bars. The last dorm was filled with two-story wooden bunks, and with a little more room to walk. However, if it rained at night, those guys were out of luck, because much of the sheet metal roof was so old it had holes in it, and in some places, it had completely rusted out.

Another one of the oh so enticing aspects of the coffee harvest is the food. The more time people spend picking coffee, the more coffee is picked, and the more money the owners make. Therefore, the pickers are required to work about 12 hours a day. That does not leave much time for cooking, so the farms provide the food for the workers. On my farm, we survived off a steady diet of a handful of rice, less than a handful of beans, and an extremely hard and dry corn tortilla. Three meals a day. Seven days a week. Because the owners were so generous, twice a week we would either get a hardboiled egg, or a little bit of spaghetti noodles with sauce. Needless to say, it is a struggle to work 12 hours a day with meager food rations. In Nicaragua, labor laws state that on an agricultural farm, if the owner does not provide food for the workers, he is required to pay them an additional 30 cordobas (1 US dollar) per day. However, calculating the cost of the rice, beans, and tortillas, we ate about 50 cents worth of food per day. Considering that the two cooks who made all of the meals were each paid about five dollars a day, the owner was not losing too much money in labor costs. Many of the pickers would walk 30 minutes to the nearest store to buy rice, beans, cheese, or bread, to supplement the poor excuse for meals we were given each day. Every morning around 4am and every evening around seven, the darkness was lit up with many small fires as the workers cooked a little more rice to help them make it through the day.

You would expect that the pay in the coffee farms would be decent if people are willing to put up with the poor living conditions, but that is not true either. Coffee pickers are paid by the amount of coffee they pick. The more they pick, the more they are paid. I certainly was not the fastest picker on the farm, but I held my own, picking a little more than the average. In the month that I worked picking coffee, I made anywhere between $3 and $6 dollars per day. Those who picked more than me made up to $7 or $8 a day, and those that picked less were making $2 or $3. That is working twelve-hour days, in a country were the agricultural minimum wage is $5.50 for an eight-hour workday. At the end of the two-week pay period, most people walked away with between $30 and $60 dollars. So who in their right mind would work in the rain, with little food, and sleep every night on wooden planks or steel bars? The poorest of the poor. The migrant coffee pickers of Central America are those who do not have a steady job in their hometown. The elderly who cannot get work anywhere else. The rural youth who do not have other options. The illiterate and those with little education. The single moms who do not receive child support. The mentally ill. The alcoholics who cannot hold a job. And who are the owners of these coffee farms? Many of them are the richest of Central America.

The coffee farm I worked at is owned by one of the most famous and powerful families in Nicaragua. They own coffee farm and restaurants, among other things. They own a coffee exporting business that operates worldwide. There is a set of islands in Lake Nicaragua, not far from where I live, where wealthy Nicaraguans and foreigners build their vacation homes, and one of the largest and most luxurious of these island homes is owned by them, although the people that live nearby say they rarely visit. The home the family lives in is located on the coffee farm where I worked, and it is a place that would make most doctors and lawyers in the States jealous. Needless to say, it is huge and perfectly manicured. Most of us would say that this is the definition of social injustice. The rich exploiting the poor. The poor working long days in the rain with little food, so that the owners can buy another new car, or upgrade their private island getaway. That is certainly the way I see it. But that is not the way they see it.

One day while I was there, I got the opportunity to meet the owner of the farm. He walked by while I was working, and surprised to see a young gringo picking coffee, he came up and started a conversation. He went to college in the U.S. and spoke English as well as I do. He told me a little bit about the history of the farm, and asked me why I was there picking coffee. He also sheepishly asked me what I thought of the working conditions. I told him that it was hard for me to justify their luxurious house and wealthy lifestyle, while we were eating a handful of rice each day and sleeping on wooden slats each night. He said that in a way he understood, and that he was trying to make things better. This year they had just build eight new latrines outside where the dorms are. In previous years, there had only been four for the hundreds of workers that lived there, so they were all forced to relieve themselves in the woods around the campsite. Workers that had been there in years past told me that there were certain areas no one would walk near because the stench was so nauseating. The same family has owned this coffee farm for fifteen years, and just now they have enough latrines to accommodate the workers...

But the thing is, just talking to him, he did not seem like that bad of a guy. He was probably in his 30s, hip, and friendly. He lamented the low wages that the workers earn, as if that is just the way it has to be. He said he wanted to turn one of the warehouses into a school, so the many young children who accompany their working parents would have something else to do other than wander the coffee fields all day. If you look on the website of their coffee exporting business, they have a section entitled "Social Responsibility," where it talks about how they give back to poor coffee farming communities through improving local education.  But it is all lip service. A meager attempt to ease their conscience and while trying to convince themselves and others that they are socially responsible human beings.

Loaded down coffee plant.

After returning home to my village, I ran into another gringo friend living in Nicaragua, and told him about my experience on the coffee farm. He questioned how the owners could live with themselves, exploiting the poorest of the poor to provide for their luxurious lifestyles. I would argue that is because they have no understanding of the reality of the coffee harvest. They live secluded in their private mansions, shielding their eyes and thoughts from the reality they have created.  Sure they understand how to calculate profits, negotiate deals, and manage payrolls, but they do not know what it is like to work all day in the rain, eating just a handful of rice and beans, and be rewarded at the end of it with just $30 for two weeks of work. If they truly experienced and understood the reality of the migrant rural farm worker, their actions would become more socially responsible, and not just their rhetoric.

But it is easy to throw rocks from the outside. Blame others for the social injustices that occur in the world. Find someone richer and more horrible than ourselves, and place all of the blame on them. That helps keep our conscience clear. It diverts our attention from our own actions, and helps us to focus on other people's defects and not our own. Inequality is uncomfortable to see, and no one wants to feel responsible for it. That is why wealthy homes are not built in the slums. Most people do not want to wake up every morning and be reminded of how rich they are. Out of sight, out of mind. But shielding our eyes from the reality of the world does not change anything.

We need a different perspective, a different outlook, a greater awareness. We need to look at the state of things with fresh eyes. The majority of people do not consider themselves to be exploiters of the poor, and that includes coffee farm owners. They see things from a different perspective. A perspective that is convenient to their standard of living, and reinforcing of the status quo. A perspective that does not threaten them, and does not require sacrifice.  That does not affect their profits. And the majority of us see things the same way. Social justice and equality is great, as long as it does not affect our standard of living. If our company's website has a tab entitled "Social Responsibility," and we tithe to our church and give to charity at Christmas, we can sleep easy at night considering ourselves to be good people. We all shield ourselves from our participation in the perpetuation of poverty, inequality, and injustice. We are all coffee farm owners in many ways.

However, if we had a deeper understanding of poverty, a personal experience of injustice, we could more easily see things from a different perspective. We have to seek to understand more. We have to pray for a fresh, more honest and objective perspective. We have to humbly try to understand how we participate in the exploitation of the weak and marginalized. We cannot be afraid to see our own fault in the suffering of the poor. We need more humility. We cannot be afraid to lower our standard of living for the creation of justice for all. If we only think in about our profits, no real change will happen. Would you pay $6 or $8 for a cup of Starbucks if it meant that coffee workers worldwide could live in more just conditions and receive more decent wages? Would you pay $25 instead of $15 for a t-shirt if it meant better conditions and wages for textile factory workers overseas?  Would you pay more for health insurance, if it meant everyone could have access to healthcare?

The truth is, some would, and some would not. Only the individual can answer that question for himself. We are all personally responsible for our response. We can try to place the blame on others, or justify our actions by saying that everyone else is doing the same, but that will not change the reality, and it will not undo our participation in it.

Change can happen, but we cannot wait for someone else to bring it about. We must actively work for change in our own lives. Only then will the Nicaraguan coffee picker, and the rest of the marginalized people worldwide, live in a more just and peaceful world.