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.