Meet the Coffee Farmers We Buy from in APECAFORMM, Guatemala In the mountains of southwestern Guatemala, up a dusty switchback road past the point where electricity running from the nearest city cuts off, sits the town of Pueblo Nuevo. From the town's high elevation, a trained eye looking north past the silhouette of a nearby volcano can see into the southern reaches of Mexico. Tajumulco Volcano, for which Pueblo Nuevo's municipality is named, pushes 13,816 feet into the sky, holding title as Central America's highest peak. Although the wide-angle view seems to connect the town with the greater world, Pueblo Nuevo is actually quite isolated. Seemingly abandoned by the government, not only does the town lack electricity, but also running water. Water has to be hauled up top in giant containers and collected by residents to bring back to their homes. Pueblo Nuevo is the centrally located hub town for APECAFORMM's (Association of Small-scale Organic Maya-Mames Coffee Farmers) 17 producer communities, all of which are located within a day's walk from it. In the average APECAFORMM family, men reach their tiny one-acre fields at seven o'clock each morning after hiking up to an hour from home and they work until three or four in the afternoon. Children are in school during that time, and women perform typical household tasks. Women also raise chickens, pigs, or rabbits and the garden crops to make up for a small-scale farmer's modest income. Avocado, lemon, orange and banana trees, and small medicinal and vegetable gardens pragmatically landscape farmhouse yards. Families of six to eight people often live in one-room houses made of brick or wood with tin roofs and floors sometimes made of cement and they go to sleep when the sun sets for lack of electric light. Although their material lives are simple, APECAFORMM families achieved stability by coming together to form a cooperative. The organization was formed in 1992 on the heels of Guatemala's brutal civil war, in spite of the government's hostility at that time toward independent civilian associations as they were seen as subversive toward the military. It took six more years before APECAFORMM became a legal organization. Before forming the coop, farmers were often at the mercy of "coyotes," or unscrupulous middlemen who underpaid and cheated them out of the worth of their coffee harvest. Some farmers resorted to migrating to Mexico to offer their labor at big coffee or banana plantations at the expense of their own farms. In its uncertain infancy, APECAFORMM struggled to grow as members uneasy about the government's mistrust of the organization dropped out. Producers who stuck with it found coffee buyers to whom they sold more coffee each year than they had the previous year, and at better prices. Seeing this success more people joined the organization and it grew back to its original size of about 400 members. Producers now earn $1.07/pound for green coffee. The remaining 34 cents per pound paid for fair trade and organic certified coffee goes to APECAFORMM's communal fund and to pay its export coordinator, Manos Campesinas. Part of APECAFORMM's success has been due to having joined forces in 1996 with this organization which coordinates export for over half a dozen groups of small-scale producers. In addition to finding direct markets in Europe and North America such as Peace Coffee, Manos Campesinas also helps the producers with limited pre-financing and helped them become fair trade and organic certified. A primary instrument of growth for APECAFORMM has been the use of agricultural "promoters," who are trained by Manos Campesinas and paid to instruct other producers. APECAFORMM uses its pooled fair trade premium from coffee sales to pay promoters in each of its 17 communities and in each of four "centers" to learn organic farming techniques such as composting and in turn to teach other producers those skills. (Members are represented by a board of directors at each of three organizational levels, starting with the most local board at the community level. Communities are organized geographically into four "centers," whose boards send representatives to the most central board at Pueblo Nuevo.) Members have also allocated money to pay for infrastructure such as office space and supplies. The self-reliance APECAFORMM's promoter system exemplifies is perhaps the organization's greatest strength. With the exception of Manos Campesinas' ongoing commercial help and at the beginning limited financial support from the Catholic Church, the organization has had to rely solely on the diligence and ingenuity of its members to move forward. "In other communities, it might be the case that everything has to be spelled out, arranged, coordinated, etc. for the producers, whereas in APECAFORMM they just try to learn something and then see how to put things in practice with their own means," explained Jeronimo Bollen, general manager of Manos Campesinas. He praises the organization for hiring the promoters to empower all its members to be knowledgeable and competent organic farmers. Bollen said Manos Campesinas requires all farmers to meet the high coffee quality standards their northern clients expect from fair trade coffee. These coffee growers have come a long way since they began to organize for a better future after the war. In a symbolic effort to push forward toward a brighter day, they bulldozed an abandoned military base on their land they suspected was used to detain and torture POWs. They have since erected a church in the same spot. Check out the April 2006 issue of Fair Grounds to read about our visit to APECAFORMM.