Coffee Organizer Finds News for Celebration — and Concern

By Shayna Harris

January 26, 2006

Farm workers turn sun-dried coffee beans at the Ferro cooperative in southern Ethiopia (Photo: Shayna Harris/Oxfam America)

Negele Gurbitu, ETHIOPIA — It felt like the first day of third grade.

Trying to not to attract too much attention, I scooted between the rows of long wooden benches, looking for an empty seat. As I searched, the bright eyes of 50 Ethiopian children followed me. It was my first trip to their country, but I was the curiosity of the day. Many of the students, some as young as six years old, had never seen a white person before.

As the Coffee Organizer for Oxfam America, I traveled to Ethiopia this December to visit local coffee cooperatives and learn more about the lives of the coffee producers and their families. It was an incredibly moving experience for me. On the one hand, I saw the real impact of fair trade on the lives of the families that I met. On the other, there were constant reminders of how difficult life is for coffee growing families.

The morning we met the children in their cheery yellow classroom was an uplifting one. In this community, more than 550 students had once crammed into two classrooms. Their parents knew this was no way to learn, so they pooled together some of their profits from fair trade coffee sales and expanded the school. Now there are four new classrooms and a teacher’s room. And more desks and chairs are on the way.

“Before we couldn’t control the class,” said the school director Mudesir Kedit. The new and improved school is “a good environment … and it’s better for the students.”

We had arrived in the incredibly lush community of Negele Gurbitu, part of the Oromia Farmers Cooperative Union, earlier that day. At first I never would have believed we were in Ethiopia. The southern part of the country, where coffee is grown, is green and almost tropical-looking. It looked nothing like the images of the dry, famine-ravaged land I had heard about.

Looking at the flourishing countryside, you would assume that several crops would grow well there. But the truth is people in these communities depend almost completely on coffee for their livelihoods. They don’t grow much of anything else because they need all the land they can get for their main crop. Since these farmers can’t feed their children coffee for breakfast, whole communities suffer when coffee prices are low and there isn’t enough money to buy food.

Over and over again, we heard the same problems. Lush countryside. No food. High-quality Ethiopian coffee. Farmers receiving “starving wages.” While I thought back on the images of those sweet children singing a welcome song to me in their new classroom, I couldn’t ignore the heartbreaking stories of the suffering and starvation that remained.

I had heard similar complaints from coffee farmers while traveling through Central America. But the severity of the problems was so much worse in Ethiopia, where families are large and share very small plots. Since local farmers grow only one crop on this land, the price they receive for their coffee determines if and how often they feed their kids.

That’s where the farming cooperative comes in. Cooperative members collectively process their coffee and enjoy higher, steady prices for their beans. They sell to the fair trade market, and earn a premium which is used to feed their families, provide them with healthcare, or, as with the school, use for social projects in the community. Oxfam helps the cooperatives learn more about coffee quality training and coffee processing, and gain access to fair trade and organic markets.

Tadlh Ketama, a member of the Adis Ketama cooperative, part of the Yirgacheffe Farmers Cooperative Union, told me that before the cooperative sold fair trade members were forced to take the “starving wages” private buyers were willing to dole out.

“Now farmers are selling at a fair price to the cooperative,” she said. What’s more, the cooperative price is forcing private buyers to pay more.

I was astonished at the great impact of the cooperative. It’s like a web, and the cooperative is at the middle. Though the cooperative has a limited membership, the effects of the higher prices it pays are spinning far beyond the immediate community.

When the coffee farmers make a decent income, they can afford to do more than live day to day. They can focus on larger threats such as AIDS and poor access to clean water and healthcare remain. Oxfam’s field staff in Ethiopia help provide the resources to address these problems.

It’s late in the day and the sun casts a beautiful light over the Ethiopian countryside. I take in a deep breath. We are at Adis Ketama, or the “New City,” Tadlh’s cooperative. I follow a group of cooperative leaders as we trek down to an open pit filled with murky liquid. It’s thick and greenish brown and smells like stale goat cheese. Luckily it’s located down-wind from the community.

As I wonder what in the world this filthy pit could contain, the chairman of the Adis Ketama cooperative says that they are lucky this muck is no longer mixed in with the community water source. It’s the byproduct of the coffee harvest, which once polluted the local water supply and produced dire consequences. Children, cattle, and vegetation died. And the pollution poisoned the communities living downstream.

Hearing about this life and death threat, Oxfam sponsored a water project to separate the coffee waste from the river and dump it into a holding talk — hence the reeking mud. The community also installed a clean water pump and now is able to clean the coffee more efficiently, creating less waste.

“Thanks to the (cooperative) union and Oxfam we have a water cleaning machine to help process coffee better,” Tadlh said.

Tadlh, Sandra, our translator, and I sit in the cooperative office, drinking coffee. Tadlh, a single mother, tells me her children can only go to school when she can make a profit off of coffee. In a typical day this incredibly strong woman carries water two kilometers to her home, works on her small coffee plot, and tends to the cows, her children, and home. She asks about my life and role as a woman in the United States, and I shyly share a typical day as an Oxfam Campaigner with her, which pales in comparison to her struggles and the incredible strength and dignity with which she carries on her daily work.

I ask Tadlh how she views the future, what dreams she has. With a faint glimmer in her eye she reflects for a minute. She would like all of her children to go to school so that they can have an easier life than she has had. Sandra and I nod as Tadlh shares these dreams for her family — they are not so different than our own. We would also like to see the younger generation live with the access to basic daily necessities, and more, to control over how they choose to live their lives.

Feeling somewhat overwhelmed by the immensity of the challenges I’ve seen, I ask Tadlh if she has hope for her four children. Her answer gave me perspective, and even, some hope.

“I have faith because now we live better,” she said. “I think that we will continue to live better–we are fighting to live better each day.”