ACCSO: The difference a war makes

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I stand in the in the open air of the pick up bed, my knees slightly bent, arms clutching the top of the cabin as we fly down another hairpin turn of the narrow dirt road that scales these coffee mountains and the only thought running through my mind, when I should be fearing for my life and limbs, is pure joy. I think faster Don Felipe! Faster! In this moment, I realize that no matter how adult I feel on my solo sojourn around the world, part of me will always be that 13-year old girl who loves to drive ATVs too fast and crash them into trees.

When we return to the town, my host Felipe, the young catador (cupper) with a fledgling cooperative, tells his father, Don Felipe, to bring us back to the house. He wants me to be able to rest up before we head into town for the Saturday night festivities. This tiny, tight-knit mountainside town spends Friday and Saturday nights watching local men do battle on the concrete basketball court turned futbol field. Spectators fill the three levels of benches that line the cement field, sitting at rapt attention as teams of five men each fight for fifteen minute increments. When the whistle blows, the team with fewer goals slinks off defeated while the five men with the lead play on to turn back the newest challenger. The only enforced rule is that players may not kick the ball above shoulder height kick so as not to injure a spectator. Shin guards have no place on this field.

As the game begins, a forward kicks the goalie in the shin, drawing blood. The next time he attacks the goal he sports a bright black and blue shiner, retribution from the other end of the field. He punches the ball into the net and then fondly messes the hair of the goalie before jogging back down the field. Neither bruises nor blood are personal. On Monday, teammates and rivals will work side by side in the fields to bring in the coffee harvest. At halftime, kids the size of marionettes flood the court. Mimicking the rough tactics of the grown players, they bounce off the pavement like rubber balls, always popping up with smiles stretching across their faces. A girl, maybe 8, is elbowed to the ground by her 9 year old male cousin. When she bounces back up, blood drips down her knee. She looks at me and laughs before chasing down the ball. At nine she plays imbued with a passion and reckless abandon for her own well-being that rivals the men on the field.

Sitting on the edge of the pitch, I find the combination of ferocity and gaiety in the play of adults and children alike a striking reflection of their daily reality. In this little town, like so many others across the developing world, people live life with a hard edge. A scrapped knee barely approaches the pain of an empty belly. A swollen face from the fist fight provoked on the pitch pails next to the threat of a poor harvest. Risk dominates their lives. Tomorrow they could lose everything to a storm or a flare up of violence but that would be nothing new. In reaction to living life in such close proximity to complete destitution, actions westerners see as audacious are a commonplace part of everyday life. They play imbued with passion and fearlessness as a way to cope with their knowledge of the daily dangers threatening the survival of their families.

The entire community carries this bravado from forty years of living in crisis. From 1960 till the hostilities ended in 1996, war tore across the region, wearing away the tenuous fabric of community that connected families and neighbors. A product of the anti- Marxist cold war rhetoric, any individual who worked cooperatively with their neighbors to improve their well-being faced barbaric violence. According to Don Felipe, the head of a small group of farmers outside this mountain village and father of my host, “Este es en el pais. Somos individualistas, es una situacion de la guerilla. Tiene miedo de ser organizado por la Guerra. Porque habian violencia contra las personas que trabajaban en grupos.”

After the war, farmers began picking up the pieces of their livelihoods. As coffee production recovered from years of neglect, the coyotes flourished. The Coyotes are local buyers who travel to farming communities with their large trucks to purchase coffee from rural farmers. Named after the spry canine predator for their ruthlessness, they buy coffee when people need immediate cash to cover their expenses and provide credit contingent on next year’s coffee supply to struggling farmers. In return for these services, the coyotes pay an extremely low price for the coffee. Over time, the farmers have grown accustomed to the economic services provided by the coyotes. They depend on receiving enough credit to cover the costs of the harvest and to be able to sell their coffee whenever they need money. While the coyotes’ low prices undeniably erode the economic means of these farmers, their services help the farmers stretch their coffee income across the year by providing them with advances when the money from last year’s crop as run out.

As the local economy began to improve, the Coffee Crisis struck. With prices well below the cost of caring for their farms, producers stopped fertilizing their fields and look for outside work to pay their bills. Some became drivers of the colorfully colored chicken buses carrying people between Guatemala city and Yute. Some found physical labor resembling that of a coffee farm planting trees in government sponsored reforestation projects. Some burned down their coffee plantations all together.

Into this history and economic context entered a sustainable development project run by EDE Consulting, the foundation arm of the Neumann Cooperation the second largest coffee trading house in the world, and funded by Tim Horton’s, an international coffee roasting company that owns donut shops across Canada and the U.S. Working together, they aim to revolutionize the trading and farming systems within villages across the Chezaltapeque region of Guatemala. Their vision of long-term sustainability is founded in a long-term trading relationship between Tim Horton’s and farmers accompanied by improved social services, like schools and clean water, and trainings in environmentally benign farming practices. This trade-based aid creates a partnership between the community and the donor which goes beyond funder and funded. Tim Horton’s has a business and human interest in the well-being of these coffee farming communities. The goal of this partnership is to insure that Tim Horton’s receives high quality Guatemalan coffee to stock in their donut shops while the farmers gain a sustainable livelihood.

The first step of the project was to combat the sway of the coyotes over the coffee farmers. To achieve this, they set up an association named ACCSO, composed of many little cooperatives housed in each village and governed by a democratically elected board of farmers with several professional staff running daily operations. ACCSO created a network of people that could process the coffee to the standards of Tim Horton’s and to sell the combined coffee of many individual farmers in a lone large lot on the international market. ACCSO also serves as a vehicle through which the project disseminated training sessions on proper farming practices and allocated telesecundaries and health clinics.

The foundation of the cooperative consists of small groups of fifteen to twenty farmers living within each village. For the thousands of the farmers participating in the project, the groups are the everyday face of ACCSO. With funding from Tim Horton’s and the farming communities, the farmers worked together to build roofs over processing facilities and wash the coffee from the harvest. The head of the groups dispenses payment and credit to the farmers.

Due to the widespread suffering in Guatemala after the war, the Tim Horton’s project dropped into an area with a rich history of aid projects. On the kitchen walls of one hut, I saw posters advertising a UNDP project protecting the local forests at the top of the hills, a GTZ project pamphlet for clean water and a USAID calendar. The woman frying tortillas inside tentatively stepped away from the heat rising off the stove to speak with the strange gringa outside her home. When I ask her about ACCSO, she says, “It is better with the project. In grupos it is betters to ask for help.” Every time one of these projects arrives, they organize the community into groups to accept the aid. This pattern developed an expectation within the villages that groups are necessary to receive international aid. With each additional project, the expectation of groups as vehicles for receiving aide became a social norm. The villagers see the groups organized by the Tim Horton’s project to be part of ACCSO as mechanisms through which they will receive more international aid, rather than as a path to their economic independence.

This sentiment echoed across the hills, in almost every interview I conducted with a family. Many farmers remain dubious concerning the economic advantages of ACCSO but deliver a portion of their coffee to the cooperative because of the social services the project has provided to their communities. One participating farmer said, “If there is little difference in the price, I see the social services as an addition in ACCSO and a reason to sell my coffee to them.” If there is no a significant difference in ACCSO’s price on the local market, they may receive coffee from their members to generate greater social projects. It is unclear whether farmers will continue to deliver their coffee to ACCSO during tough times, when the local coyotes look to undercut the cooperative by raising prices. Many do not believe that ACCSO will survive long enough to impact their future prosperity.

This year tested the strength of the farmers’ commitment to sell their coffee to ACCSO. In its third year, ACCSO prefinanced a large amount of coffee. To gain the funds, they signed a contract with SERTINSA, the local Neumann branch, for a fixed amount of coffee at a competitive price. Over the course of the season prices skyrocketed, reaching highs of 1.80 per pound on the New York C market. The booming bear market bore no resemblance to the Crisis, when 40 cents per pound destroyed the viability of coffee farming five years ago. When the local coyotes offered a higher price than ACCSO prefinanced, farmers sold the coffee they promised to ACCSO on the local market. The cooperative was left with millions of quetzals in debt and an unfulfilled contract for thousands of quintales of coffee.

To satisfy their contracts, local group leaders became coyotes, buying processed coffee from their neighbors and adjacent villages. After this season, many farmers lost sight of how ACCSO was different from the coyotes. Both competed for coffee picked and processed on the farm. I sat in the factory, teetering between two deep concrete washing tanks to interview a man who has worked closely with the project. He attended coffee husbandry presentations and worked in the factory to process the coffee to the stringent Tim Horton’s standards. He spoke unabashedly about his experience, but did not want to give his name. The people promoting the project did a lot for him, he said, and he did not want them to know his criticisms. This year, during the melee of high costs and fluctuating prices, he promised more coffee to the coyotes than ACCSO because he needed more credit to cover his costs than ACCSO provided. He likes the groups, yet when the prices are the same, he does not think the extra work processing the coffee in the factory is worth it.

This fledgling cooperative does not posses a capital of trust from their members, which more weathered institutions depend on to survive adverse market conditions. People make rational economic decisions. Like people with limited funds to invest in the stock market, farmers seek to sell their coffee to a sure bet. To a farmer, a sure bet is a buyer who will buy their coffee and prefinance their expenses through many seasons. They are unsure whether ACCSO is worth the risk of losing a few quetzales, guatemalan currency, one harvest out of the belief they will gain more in the next. At the core of their dilemma lies the uncertainty of whether or not this internationally funded construction is more than a passing fad.

Rosa is the current ACCSO secretary. She owns a few manzanas of coffee next to her husband’s parcels. When she was a child, there was no school in her village so she struggles to read and write. She eyes widen with awe as she describes how grateful she is to ACCSO for providing a woman like herself, with little education, the opportunity to serve on the board. I sense her new position still surprises her. As we stroll through the mountains surrounding her home, she expresses a deep faith in ACCSOs future and the ability of this institution to lift her community out of their poverty. Her children receive a secondary education due to the telesecundarias provided by ACCSO to their local school house. Despite the adversity facing ACCSO this season, she believes that as a group they are stronger than when they sell their coffee individually. With time, more seasons, they will be better able to provide for the community. She knows that her neighbors do not always recognize the benefits that they themselves can provide by working together, but they will understand with time. She has faith.

We travel down a steep narrow path. She skips down as I lumber, careful with each step so as not to fall into the bushes below. Finding flat ground, we stride confidently up to a relatively large house for this mountain top community. A young girl stands scrubbing clothes up and down a wash board. Upon our arrival, a young boy runs out into the fields, signaling his position with a dust cloud floating behind him. A few moments later a short, lithe man carrying a machete emerges from the forest like farm. He is Guillermo Diaz Felipe, the ex-president of ACCSO after stepping down from a two year term. Beaming up at me with a broad smile, he waves his hand for me to take a seat across from him. His wife soon emerges from the kitchen with a steaming cup of coffee. My fifth for the day. For several hours, he describes the benefits of coffee, ACCSO and their importance to the community. He understands the unique difficulty in organizing a cooperative among his disheartened people. When he founded the group, he struggled to gather together farmers. Many people did not believe that this group will be any different from the coyotes. “Once they see,” he says, “they will understand and more people will join the group.”

Tim Hortons sponsored a trip for him to visit an older, vibrant cooperative in Honduras. After witnessing the many benefits this strong institution, fortified by many years of struggle, he is confident that his own community will recognize the potential of this new way of doing business. Finally, I ask him about the current problems facing ACCSO, that people seem to have little faith in the ability of this new organization to make a concrete difference in their economic well-being. His response, “Defendamos la produccion. De ella quedamos medicina, libro, escuela.” To Guillermo, the struggle for the future of ACCSO is worth the short term difficulties because from her success will come many benefits to their community. With time, he believes people will understand and bring their coffee to ACCSO.

Rosa’s brother echoes this sentiment. He lives in a small house with several puppies running around his feet. He is not a member of the board, but rather the brother of one. He sold all his coffee to the association because he believes, “ACCSO va a ser a una fuente de vida, algo permanente.” When I ask him if ACCSO is sustainable, Rosa steps in. “Sustainable equals a good market,” she says, “ACCSO provides good markets.” I am struck by this moment. Despite the education provided by the project on social services, farming techniques and female advancement, for these farmers the most important aspect of sustainability remains a better price for their coffee.

Sitting in Don Felipe’s home, Abigail Faya strokes the head of a small white dog that tails him through out the village. He looks me in the eye and says, “Estamos luchando para lograr una exportacion directa.” He recognizes that working in the group is a daily battle to achieve this goal. While he recognizes their common purpose, he is not able to sell all his coffee to the cooperative. He easily admits that when he needs it, he sells to the coyote.

Around the soccer pitch that Saturday night, Felipe tells me a story about his father’s village. They once held a meeting to discuss all the problems between the people of the village. They wanted everyone to get together and discuss them to make the group stronger. Everyone attended and brought a gun. At this meeting, no one said a bad word against anyone. They left without discussing a single problem. In this war torn country, old wounds are slow to heal.

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