Paterno   

For the first time I toured the huge “warehouse,” as Paolo calls it, which is leased from the regional government, but is a combination packing shed, orange sorting and processing operation, olive oil manufacturing plant, and much more.  Consorzio Terre Di Sicilia is a model, organic, educational, and experimental farming location, but it is also largely empty, inoperative, and laden with debt.  At one point serving 1000 customers all over Sicily with certified organic products, it now was little used, waiting for an EU loan of 200,000 euros over the last number of years, which still hadn’t arrived, and only a place for a couple of small farmers to sort their oranges by size with one of the giant machines.  Paolo had tried to turn it all into a cooperative over 5 years, but it didn’t work out…just not enough interest.

Similar to our friends with COMUCAP in Honduras and their coffee and aloe vera looking for markets, I started asking what it would take to get the marmalade made here over to North America where ACORN International could move it through Fair Grinds and other places to support the survival of farming in Sicily.  Get ready for a headache.

The blood oranges as fresh fruit are impractical to even consider because of cost and requirements to prevent Mediterranean fly from coming to our shores.  Scratch that.

How about fair trade, organic marmalade?  Well, organic is easy.  Rigorous Italian and European Union inspections are already in place which would meet any requirements.  Fair trade, though, probably not it seems.  This is not a co-op.  Looking at the FLO affiliate website FairTrade Italia it seems they only bring in products from the rest of the developing world.  When my friends have described Sicily as the Appalachia of Europe and of Italy, that doesn’t seem to count.

There has to be a way.  This stuff is too good not to save and survive.

New Orleans

ACORN International is preparing to issue a report that looks more carefully at the claims of fair trade products and attempts to sort out the substance from the sizzle.  Additionally, since I’m wrapping my arms more firmly against the real business of buying and selling fair trade coffee and other products at Fair Grinds Coffeehouse in New Orleans, I’m also learning the real lessons that can be wildly different than what we hope might be the case every time we take a gulp.

I originally became skeptical of some of these claims while visiting with our partners, the women’s coffee and aloe vera cooperative, COMUCAP, in Marcala, Honduras in the mountains of the La Paz district, several hours from Tegucigalpa.  The way fair trade certification works there is a slight premium for fair trade certified coffee over the bulk market price of roughly a 10% per pound and if also certified as organic, then add roughly another quarter a pound.  This is what the actual producers with dirt on their hands receive at the point of production.
In the article Tulane professor Rick Aubry averred that “FairTrade USA has leveraged the consuming power of people who buy coffee and bananas in a way that lifts the millions of people who grow those products out of poverty.”  Wow!  I wish!!!

Looking at a Food First! Study a couple of years ago, the real economics are clearer:
In March of 2007, FLO [the international certifying agency] raised the floating Fairtrade premium from 5 cents to 10 cents [per pound], and the Organic differential—the additional premium for coffee that is certified Organic—from 15 to 20 cents (FLO, 2007a). This move came in response to a cost study by a farmers union that showed that Fairtrade prices were below the cost of production for many farmers.

Couple this with the fact that a that time the pricing by the certifiers was:
The trademarked Fair Trade Certified packaging label informs consumers that farmers received a $1.26 price floor and a 10 cent (floating) price premium above the market price.

By the time Fair Grinds makes a purchase either through national suppliers like Café Campesino on the West Coast or Gene’s Beans in Boston or wherever the cost after roasting and delivery is pushing $10 bucks a pound now.   Getting fair trade right off the docks at the Port of New Orleans, which we are now doing since we started managing the coffeehouse, we are paying almost that same rate for the finished beans.  The premium that is still sitting at the bottom of that cup of coffee for the real producers is mighty damn small and puny, and certainly not a ticket out of poverty for the farmers I have met and spoken to in Honduras and elsewhere.

The notion in a competitive market that Fair Grinds can charge more than Starbucks and other local competitors also seems wrong.  FairTrade USA (formally TransFair USA) may have some surveys that indicate that people say they will pay substantially more, but many on the other side of the counter do not hear the willingness in a recession to go as high as the claim.  Of course Costa’s, the big international coffeehouse chain, charges a quarter more for a fair-trade cup of coffee and simply keeps the quarter, while the customer is hoping somehow that they just helped the poor farmer in the global south.
What’s my point?  Yes, we need to support fair-trade.  But, we also need to do more to make sure that this is not simply marketing and hype and that the money really does move to improve the livelihoods of the producers and their communities.  This is part of real transparency as well, and we owe it to ourselves and our neighbors in the rest of the world to not just feel good, but to do good.

Ottawa

Yesterday was not necessarily a typical day and in fact I might even say it was an extraordinary day, but whatever kind of day it was, it gave good cause to celebrate how special a day in the work as an organizer continues to be.

• Start the day writing the Chief Organizer Blog and expresses some thanks to FairTrade Canada and the prospects of a breakthrough for the partnership of COMUCAP and ACORN International in Honduras.  If it works, it could be a big step towards the self-sufficiency of our Latin American affiliates in the future.
• Write the preface for Global Grassroots:  International Perspectives on Organizing, second book to be published by Social Policy Press and due out by July 4^th.
• Take the draft minutes for the ACORN Canada board meeting and then the Annual General Meeting (AGM) required by Canadian charity law, enjoy the serious deliberation of the leadership and head organizer, Judy Duncan, and occasionally get pulled into the discussion on our joint Remittance Justice Campaign.
• Finalize the confirmation with the organizers of the Palermo Movement in Sicily to visit with them and the Simeto River organization in Catania in early October to discuss partnership and affiliation after the Organizers’ Forum delegation completes its work in Cairo.
• Agree to meet with the Urban Affairs Department of the University of Memphis at the Highland Center in mid-October to assist with their planning.
• Get the call that we have a tentative agreement to accept a donation to ACORN International of a mobile bio-diesel station for New Orleans that will be ready for pick-up in Santa Barbara, California within the month!
• Spend an hour in a conference call with organizers for four different groups in Springfield, Massachusetts sharing the lessons from our Katrina work and discussing immediate steps necessary to organize and assist survivors in winning forbearance and rebuilding after the devastating tornado recently in that city.
• Have a couple of juicy burgers with Kool-Aid hosted by one of the leaders of Ottawa ACORN for the British Columbia members already here and get to discuss with her husband some of his thoughts after having read Citizen Wealth.
• Sit in on the final details staff meeting for the ACORN Canada convention at 11 PM, run the ACORN International “bootleg” fundraiser, and participation in the stress and camaraderie.

I’ve been one of the luckiest people in the world to get to do something that I love and that makes a difference every day and all of my life.

A day in the life of an organizer may be hard issues, but it is “good times!”

New Orleans

Instead I simply sat there, engine idling, and stared, confronted by a sight that seemed more out of the paranoid imagination of Hollywood and bad screaming dreams in the night, than the banal reality of the day.  There was no denying that I was transfixed and staring silently at more than a half-dozen men crammed into a white Frontier pickup with machine guns and black ski masks over pulled tightly over their heads in the sweltering heat.  They were in a desperate hurry.  They were shouting to each other while jumping in and out of the back of the truck.  Their front right tire needed the same attention that ours did, and they were sprinting around the truck to solve the problem.

Who could they be?  What could they be doing?  It was 11:30 AM in the morning on a major road in a developing suburb near the airport.  There seemed no doubt that lives were at stake.

I wanted to believe at first that they might be police, perhaps some kind of SWAT team for the city or federal government perhaps routing out drug dealers or gangsters, which might explain the masks.  Nothing explained the lack of insignia anywhere on their uniforms.  The Honduran license plate is easy to recognize on the back of vehicles throughout the country.  It was even easier to recognize the fact that this pickup had no license plate on it whatsoever.  Whatever was going on here was bad, black box, and likely to end in blood.  I felt reckless snapping off a picture with my digital camera.  I wanted one badly because I could not believe what I was seeing, but at the same time my mind was racing with the internal debate of whether or not I was endangering our team, since if my camera was seen, the retaliation seemed inevitable, swift, and sharp.

They finally sped off, and we pulled over, aired up and never talked about it again, but it the experience was searing, and the lone, distant picture haunts me.

When returning to Tegucigalpa the following afternoon and touring the bulldozed homes of long time residents being evicted at the hands of the golpistas despite the titles they waved, I found myself shouting at the security guard with his sawed off shotgun and ignoring his recriminations to us and the residents that we could not proceed.  The next day when leaders reported harassment by security guards and soldiers and one of our leaders told of a death threat, we were ready to do something, and were almost surprised that our members did not demand that we drop everything and go to the police while calling for the press.  They wanted to consult others, including human rights advocates first.  They did not believe anyone would care.  We respected their reserve condifent that they knew we would stand with them if they were to call, but as an organizer, I thought that we were seeing and hearing something dangerous and fundamental.

All of this was unsettling to us, but after two years of crisis, coupes, and conflict the political culture had clearly become inured to violence.  What struck me as exceptional had somehow become routine and predictable to our members and organizers.   The paramilitaries using violence and terror to maintain control past the charade of elections and the pretense of democratic governance , might still have ski masks but they pulled them on and off and clearly no longer felt the need for dark nights and side streets.

Our members at Mazanales had predicted that the police would react.  They were exhilarated by our visit, but certain of the reaction.  We wanted to believe they were wrong, but they knew their future better than we did.  What was our responsible course?  As organizers believing in collective action our core belief has to be that nothing can be stopped without standing up.  We were learning lessons in the different calculus of risk assessment between Canada, the USA, and many other countries that did not work in Honduras and other oppressive and unstable regimes.

Once violence has infused the political culture and become almost banal in its certainty, it loses its ability to surprise, but not the awesome consequences of its implementation.  Violence changes the dynamics of organizing, even as it makes organizing, collective action, and mass resistance even more necessary and, indeed, urgent.

Marcala

To keep it simple at the start COMUCAP is a women’s production coop in this area that has developed over the years to pull together coffee growers and, more recently, families growing aloe vera on these steep Honduran hillsides.  Gradually in recent years they have begin to develop a processing side that can allow them create market ready products designed to increase the livelihood of their producers.  The coffee is good stuff, and I know something about drinking coffee, and from my days working at Luzianne Coffee Company in New Orleans as a lift truck driver and shipping clerk to try to make a living while I organized against the war (Vietnam) as a 19-year old Williams College dropout.     They have won awards for their organic coffee in international contests, and if it was good enough to boost Pabst Blue Ribbon,  maybe that might mean something for them as well.

Their biggest coup to date was a contract to ship two container loads (70000 kilos/load) to Germany last year.  Marlene, the coop director, visited to see what happened to the coffee, and late in the afternoon we sat in her kitchen and drank from some of the souvenir mugs she had brought back from various “kaffee” shops.  They were a hit in Bremen, it seems.

Interspersed between constant conversations about politics and organizing in Honduras throughout the day with Suyapa and Doris and other companeros from Tegucigalpa, who had joined us, my friends at COMUCAP taught me the production side of the coffee and aloe vera business.  Several kilometers from the store, I toured the aloe and coffee plant.  Green beans were bagged to curing in the warehouse.  Other beans were brown and drying outside in the sun on the concrete pavement.  The coffee grinder, roaster, and packer were all there in a building that was both new and hardy used.  A bride waiting for a wedding.

They also walked me through the whole processing operation for aloe vera.  Who knew?  In New Orleans these small plants were regularly shredded and rubbed into our skin by mi companera anytime me or los ninos burned our white bread.  Here the plants were huge, it seemed.  The woman president of the coop showed me how to cut a “leaf” which was done using the dull side of a butcher knife as the business end for this job.  The sticky translucent flesh of the aloe vera was cut up by one of the workers, while the “juice” was saved for shampoo.  You wouldn’t believe how many aloe vera products they make?  Soap and shampoo of course, but various juices and drinks and fruit mixes are also popular in Honduras, though expensive.  I can now say I’ve not only been rubbed right by aloe vera but have eaten and drunk it both fresh off the leaf and at the end of the line.  They market mainly for the medicinal impact and the native claim that it is wonderful for upset stomachs.

Later in the afternoon we drove along rocky, rutted mountain roads to their coffee receiving plant.  The coffee beans are brought here by the growers.  They call them cherries, because not surprisingly as they are poured into the washer, the coffee beans look like small cherry tomatoes, all red and yellow and green.  This was quite an operation, and fundamentally like a shovel and hand filled coffee washing machine, which ends up in bags on the back of a COMUCAP truck headed for the processing plant that we’ve already seen.  I asked about a huge, fancy expensive machine taking most of the space.  They had stopped using it because it “took too much water,” and water, rather than coffee is gold in these mountains.  I kidded them about the fancy equipment and the big portable generator fueling this operation while they moved around on rickety, dangerous jerry rigged ladders.  They laughed, but I didn’t, since as always in this all-hands on, labor intensive and therefore expensive process, workers were one of the cheapest commodities.

(There is no dawn this morning.  The chill has enshrouded the mountains here in fog and the whipping wind will have a lot of work to clear the hillsides and mountain tops to make room for the sun today.  This flickering candle will probably last longer than this computer battery.)

It was all thrilling, and one could feel a partnership emerging throughout the day.  The mujeres had the product and plants, but no markets.  My feeble Spanish was a perfect match for their equally weak English.  ACORN International had a base in Mexico, Canada, and the United States where they wanted to find markets, and couldn’t fathom or penetrate.  For our part we have been on a mission to puzzle through ways to build sustainable organizing operations, and if we could partner with their products, this could be a piece in the puzzle.  Or maybe not.  I woke in my dark bunk at 4 AM this Sunday morning flooded by the pluses and minuses involved in making this work, if it could be made to work at all?!?

If you want fair trade, delicious organic coffee grown by a womens coop and worked by these small producers and their families, then I’m the man to call, because we are about to be the exclusive representatives and distributors for COMUCAP in the Norte!  Or, as they say, die trying….