Of Cloud Forests & Starving Children

It was the last week of January, 2008 and the harsh beep of an alarm pulled me out of sleep. Groggy, I looked up at the peeling cement ceiling three feet above me.

I was on a top bunk in the room of a small inn. ($9 a night didn’t seem like a bad deal.) On the bunk below me was my friend Yoani — a Holland-born boy raised in the tobacco country of southern Ontario (we’d met at university) — and our cameraman, Mike, who we’d dragged all the way from his urbane Toronto haunts to the mountains of northern Nicaragua. 

Stepping out into the courtyard, I could see clouds hanging a couple hundred feet above our rooftops. Neighbourhoods of huts drifting into barren, stump-filled openness drifting into heavily wooded hillsides vaulted up the slopes of the mountains surrounding this highland vale-town. Those treed verticals rose into the mist and gave the low-hanging clouds the look of being a blanket pinned to surrounding peaks, like a child giant’s living room fortress. 

The chatty guide we’d hired told us the clouds used to often come right down into the city, but with the effects of deforestation and rising year-round temperatures, they didn’t anymore. This was as low as those clouds would get — hovering over our heads, it seemed a layer of cotton you could reach out and pluck from.

I hadn’t had a coffee in a couple days. (Of course, at this point I didn’t drink much coffee. Sure, I’d moved on from the strict straight edge-ism of my high school years to a policy of erratic, moderate consumption of coffee, alcohol, tobacco and other evils, but I tried my best to keep those closer to casual relationships than consistent habits. For the most part, I’ve kept that moderation steady up to the present day. Except for coffee. Coffee has slowly grown into a daily practice. Now I drink at least three cups a day. But it’s become a big part of my creative and professional future. At least I hope so. 

I alternate between testing out various brands and blends as necessary for “field research”, buying from a friend who owns a local roastery, and on occasion, roasting my own beans at home, though I recently got rid of the electric pan I used to use for this, owing to it’s being muddied when a sewage line backed up into our basement. Terrific experience. If you ever feel like testing the waters of sewage system disaster, I highly recommend it for purposes of “building character”.)

But getting back to Nicaragua and 2008 — like I said, it had been a couple days since my last coffee. But it seemed I was in good company, for as far as we encountered, people in Nicaragua (at least the working classes) seem to not drink much coffee. When they did, it was crappy imported coffee, the closest cousin of which you might find brewing itself to death in a neglected corner of a truck stop in someplace like Idaho. 

This was particularly odd considering we could’ve walked a couple miles in virtually any direction and found a coffee farm. For a country dominated by its participation in the volatile, abusive and multi-nationally dominated coffee industry, and for a region that produces a lot of the world’s highest quality arabica beans, they seem to really take to heart the long-standing drug dealer adage, “Don’t get hooked on your own dope.” 

But it isn’t so much that. The reason there’s not much coffee is more insidious. Coffee is the tool used to keep the people too poor to afford coffee. The industry their saggy economy is built on is one of systemic and systematic abuse of people for the sake of money. And who makes the money? North American coffee companies, for the most part. This is because the coffee industry allows a mask of anonymity to its buyers. They don’t know where their coffee came from, and their customers don’t care. Just knowing the country of origin is good enough for even the more astute coffee drinker. Forget the working conditions. Forget the local environment. Forget whether the children of workers get an education, or even adequate food. That’s someone else’s problem.

We headed further up into the mountains, travelling from farm to farm down back roads. I’ll never forget what we saw. 

“The people live like rats,” said a young man at the first farm we visited, walking up to the worker barracks in the dead of night so guards or farm managers couldn’t stop us.  Entire families packed in stalls smaller than ones I’d seen used for pigs. “This is not a life for anyone,” he said. I agreed. 

At another farm, we discovered the workers hadn’t been paid for more than a month, provided with only one serving of food a day per worker — a small bowl of low quality rice and beans. The food caused diarrhea and stomach problems, and going into the wooden sheds the workers had for homes, we saw that children were malnourished, with all sorts of health problems — diarrhea, bronchitis, flu, cough, anemia, parasites, stomach aches, fevers, and more. Almost everyone on the farm had various illnesses that could easily and cheaply be treated.

We only came intending to interview workers (something that’s usually pretty hard to do as armed guards often blocked us from speaking to workers), but this farm was worse than anything we’d seen yet. We went back to the closest town, bought medicines for some of the families we had interviewed, got some bread and coffee (yes, ironically these coffee pickers have no access to coffee, and want it badly for the cold mountain mornings) and came back to the farm. Our guide, Alvaro, who had helped with medical missions in the past, attempted to administer the medication to the individuals we had spoken with. It was a mad-house; thirty-five families or so queueing up for the goods.

One woman came up to us with an 8-month-old girl that had pneumonia for the last 2 months, and the medicine for the pneumonia only costs $7 for a full treatment. She was the same age as my own daughter who was safely back in Canada with her mother, but maybe half the size. It was heart-breaking. 

If this were a war-torn nation, or one with no real economic outputs, I could understand this sort of tragedy being the result. But here was one of the best coffee growing regions on the planet, and we were amid farms selling to all the wealthiest coffee brands we love to buy from.

How could anyone do this? 

“Who buys the coffee from this farm?”, I asked.

“Oh, we sell to the mill.” 

“Which mill?”

We were told the vast majority of coffee farms (about 70% according to the vice president of one of the local mills) are using what are called “traditional practices”. “Traditional practices” mean worker welfare is no concern, and neither is water source pollution, pesticide issues, lack of education or medical resources, or any of the things needed to have healthy families and healthy communities. Even with relatively high prices on the stock market for coffee right now, many workers and their families are malnourished, some even to the point of starvation, and many without basic access to medicines or even elementary education for their children.

Coffee is grown, coffee is picked and processed and sold on the general commodities market. Buyers don’t care where the coffee is from exactly, or what conditions it was grown under, so the exporters and mills don’t care. They don’t make any more money for caring, so everyone just does what they can. 

In fact the hardest hit on these farms, it seems, are the children. Their parents get some food from the owners of the farms so that they can work, but most people don’t even have enough at the end of the day to buy the cheapest food for the children. Food prices had doubled for their local staples in that last year, while already incredibly low wages had stayed the same. It was a painful thing to see, especially set in a landscape that looked close to paradise.

We finished our time in Nicaragua, and came back to Canada. It hadn’t been all gloomy — we’d come across many people that were trying to make a difference there in Nicaragua, including a wonderful family running a coffee mill called Esperanza Coffee, and an Ontario-educated plantation farmer named Gus (both of whom you’ll be hearing lots about in the coming months). 

And the journey went on from there. Three long years later (last fall), we launched Ethical Coffee Chain — an effort to create a platform for coffee drinkers to connect with coffee farms and make a tangible difference. It’s been a lot of hard work, sacrifice, and of highs and lows already. Yet, we’ve barely begun.