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Mon. Sept. 29, 1997
Toronto Star
By Linda Diebel
Toronto Star Latin America Bureau
If so, you probably weren't thinking, as the first pungent aroma hit your nostrils, of these far-away mountains of southern Guatemala or a young man like Julio Coq, who has seen his friends die and been threatened himself, in the fight to organize coffee workers.
"My friend Giovani Gomez was killed three years ago,'' says Coq, 33, whose Gautemalan Syndicated Workers' Union has managed to organize less than 2 per cent of the nation's 700,000 coffee workers in years of Sisyphean struggle.
"They kidnapped him. Six days later, we found his body in a sewer. He'd been beaten to death,'' he says. His eyes are darkly-circled, shoulders in a permanent old-man's slump.
" My wife is very scared for me. I, too, am frightened. I tell her next year I'll quit. Next year, I promise . . .''
Granted, these are tough images.
The worst you could imagine about coffee-picking in Latin America - especially here in feudal Guatemala - is true.
This isn't the quaint TV-ad world of Juan Valdez and his cute little donkey who show up in your supermarket or hit the U.S. Tennis Open to extol the virtues of Colombian coffee.
Rather, it's a brutal place of working children, starvation wages, bonded labor, threats and intimidation, plastic sheeting for shelter, lack of sanitation and flooding, high infant mortality, bone-breaking work and far too many deaths from easily preventable, and treatable, diseases.
Around here, donkeys are emaciated bags of bones with backs that sway under too-heavy bags of coffee beans.
This is the truth.
But the purpose of this story isn't to make the morning coffee-drinker groan: "Oh, great! Something else I'm supposed to feel guilty about.''
It's got to be tough enough for Canadians to worry about their own families and the problems of their neighborhood, their city and their country, without having to feel they must personally shoulder all the burdens of the world.
International angst.
Was that kiddie T-shirt sewn in a sweatshop in Haiti?
Were those ripe tomatoes picked by Mexican children under a searing sun?
Were the beans for my morning cuppa, whether from the supermarket shelf or a coffee outlet like Starbucks or The Second Cup picked by workers living, essentially, in bonded labor in Guatemala?
Is one to abstain from everything, or feel guilty?
Increasingly, advocates for some of the world's most exploited workers are answering with a resounding "No'' and offering alternatives.
They say this, despite continuing raw discrepancies between First and Third World lives, with some small sense of hope that public awareness is bringing about change. Educated consumers are demanding it.
"As consumers, we benefit, often unknowingly, from systems of economic injustice in countries like Guatemala. And, that's only going to intensify in our global economy,'' says Steve Coats, executive director of the Chicago-based U.S.-Guatemala Labor Education Project.
"But there's a growing movement to get companies to take responsiblity. There's more awareness, sensitivity and concern among people compared to even, say, five years ago,'' he says.
"People are beginning to insist on corporate responsiblity in the global economy. Consumers are realizing their power,'' continues Coats.
"How we in the North respond to the poverty, health and safety violations, and the denial of the basic worker right to organize in Guatemala, is to try and get companies, who buy the beans from big plantations, to support minimal standards,'' he explains.
His project was pivotal in influencing Starbucks to adopt a framework code of conduct setting minimum working, health and safety standards for its supplier countries. The leaflet campaign, focusing on Guatemala, began at Starbucks' Seattle base two years ago and spread through the United States and western Canada. It was recently suspended due to action on Starbucks' part.
It's a work in progress. A final code of conduct remains to be written and other Starbucks projects for Guatemala still are being evaluated.
"The people at Starbucks are proud of the progress we've made so far,'' says Dave Olsen, company executive vice-president. He points out the company already has helped finance community development projects "improving the lives of millions of people living in coffee-producing regions.''
He adds: "We recognize, however, that this is not enough.''
At his non-profit project, Coats is optimistic.
"Just as people have put pressure on clothing companies to accept responsiblity, consumers can put pressure on coffee companies to change the terrible conditions under which their product is produced,'' he says. "And they're doing it.''
Others, too, are hopeful.
"The consumer response we've had has been uniformly positive,'' says Bob Thomson, managing director of another non-profit group, Fair TradeMark Canada, based in Ottawa. "They like our slogan - it's 'Buycott, not Boycott.' ''
His organization, based in Europe, licenses a consumer seal of approval for various products, particularly coffee. The seal, bearing the label, Transfair, certifies that coffee, for example, has been fairly traded. Coffee carrying the label usually runs you about 16 cents more for a 300-gram package, or about a penny a cup.
But it means a minimum price paid to farmers, reasonable interest rates, longer-term purchases over crop cycles, and a guarantee the product was purchased from a registry of democratically-organized producers who give farmers control over trading.
In Europe, the campaign is a hit. Last year, the fair-trade seal covered 4 million pounds of coffee beans and 130 commercial brand names in 35,000 supermarkets.
In Canada, to date, only Ottawa's Bridgehead Inc. and Just Us Coffee Roaster Co-Op of Wolfville, N.S. sell under the Transfair seal. Thomson, however, hopes to licence tea, cocoa, sugar and honey products.
So far, none of the big-name supermarket brands has signed on.
In Toronto, The Second Cup with 560 coffee outlets across the United States and Canada, also declined - but with an alternative.
"Second Cup is a responsible retailer,'' says president Randy Powell in a statement. He says their coffee comes from "well-managed plantations that treat their workers well.''
He adds one of the company's best suppliers is in Costa Rica, and that Second Cup supports organizations such as Toronto's Second Harvest and the Foster Parents' Plan in order to "give back to the communities which produce our primary product.''
Thomson applauds these measures, but adds: "They've chosen to show co-operation through charity. We believe in social reform in the market system so farmers get to choose how to spend the money themselves.''
Overwhelmingly, however, the point is that consumers have more choice, more clout about what they buy.
Thomson, and others, suggest many ways to use it:
"We know the first time a customer asks about a fair-trade label, they think it's crazy,'' Thomson says. "But by the six or seventh inquiry, they get the message. It goes right up the chain of command.''
That's because it can be hard for coffee buyers to know where their beans are coming from.
Starbucks' Olsen, who has just returned from a fact-finding mission to Guatemala, says the challenge is to get the big plantations there to agree to a code of conduct - in the absence of direct relations between buyer and supplier.
There's good reason to focus on Guatemala.
It's the eighth largest coffee-producer in the world (after Brazil, Colombia, Ivory Coast, Indonesia, Mexico, Ethiopia and El Salvador) and has some of the worst conditions.
The concentration of land and production among a coffee lite is worse than anywhere else in Central America, says American scholar Jeffrey Paige in his recent, Coffee And Power.
"Since its origins in the late nineteenth century, the Guatemalan coffee production system has been dominated by various forms of forced labor that have varied only in whether effective control was exercised by the state or individual planters,'' writes Paige.
"Either the state required a certain number of days of forced labor from every Indian inhabitant or it backed debt servitude and labor contractors under the control of estate owners . . . a system which continues to function today.''
Here, in the fragrant highlands around the old capital of Antigua Guatemala, about 75 kilometres southeast of Guatemala City, grows some of the richest specialty coffee in the country.
It's a bucolic setting, dirt roads winding through shiny-leafed coffee bushes, birds singing and, in the distance, a view of the magnificent Acatenango Volcano.
It's late September and too early to pick, so workers are pruning and spraying pesticides.
Union organizer Coq tries to talk to a few laborers, but they're uneasy and glance around nervously.
On a patch of grass on a big plantation, Rodrigo Morroy, 42, takes a lunch break with his wife, Regina, 40, and kids, Rodrigo, 2 and Petronia, 12. The plants around them drip with pesticide. The air itself is sharp-smelling and greasy.
Morroy, Jose Raul Morales, 25, Isidro Patzan, 40, and foreman, Antonio Lopez, 44, go back to spraying the young plants. They wear no masks, no gloves, They're coated with the stuff.
"It's bad, but I have no choice,'' says Morroy. "I have to look after my family.''
"Sometimes, I dream they will give me a little piece of land of my own, and then life wouldn't be so hard,'' adds Morales. He gives a defeated shrug and jams his baseball cap down over his eyes.
About a kilometre away, another group of workers is edgy about being seen with the union man from Guatemala City.
Pedro Seguro, 67, says he ends up owing money to work on this big plantation, Finca Lortiliza. He earns a couple of dollars a day, picking and hauling 100-pound sacks of beans, but pays most of it back to the landowners for food, shelter and supplies.
It's bone-crippling work that has to be done by hand when the beans have turned from green to yellow to red.
"I've been doing this since I was a little boy and now I'm old,'' he says. "I've never had anything and I doubt I will. I owe too much.''
"It's no life,''adds Pedro Hernandez, 49, after being assured his comments would appear in a distant Canadian newspaper. "It's very, very hard work and you're tired all the time. The bosses can do anything they want to us. We're just peasants.''
Later, Coq, who himself began 15-hour days in the coffee fields at nine, describes his frustrations.
"The people don't understand their rights, and they're afraid. The problem here isn't the labor law, it's that nobody enforces it,'' he says. "They join a union, they get fired or they don't get called back. It's too dangerous for them.''
It's risky for him, too. He has a wife and two little boys.
"Look, here's how I see it,'' he explains.
"A person is born and dies, and nobody knows when they're gonna die. In between, anything can happen. I don't want the kids here to keep growing up to be serfs, so I want to use my life to fight. Maybe that makes me crazy, but I have to do it.''
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