by Anna Canning, Peace Coffee Production Manager

The other day someone asked me a question that I will borrow and make a little more simplistic here: "Why don't we teach them how to farm better?" It's a great question. At stake is what exactly we have in mind when we talk about Fair Trade, empowering farmers, fair wages, etc. It's the clichéd slippery slope: What constitutes useful assistance and what's patronizing?

My first thought was back to my recent visit to East Timor. We spent just a few short days in East Timor; while Peace Coffee does not currently buy coffee from Cafe Cooperativa Timor (CCT), other Cooperative Coffees members do and we were the first to visit the coop, which is the most successful business endeavor in the country.

USAID started providing funding to the coffee project in 1994 and their involvement shows. Compared to other coops I've seen, either in person or in pictures from co-worker's trips, CCT has amazingly sophisticated facilities. There's the dry processing mill in Dili, complete with conveyor belt sorting line, their compound on the outskirts of town with a vast shed of trucks and modern cottages for officers, the tiled, sprawling, central office complete with conference and offices for all the directors. In the mountains, two wet processing centers with 5 mechanized depulping machines each, a vast system of concrete washing ramps, and water treatment ponds down stream—quite a contrast to sorting on the floor, hand depulpers and donkey transport systems that are more or less prevalent in many other places.

Yet for every one of these signs of success, there's a corresponding struggle. The wet processing center we saw was state of the art, gleaming white tile, as is its twin higher up the mountain. Yet two more such processing mills lie idle, one occupied by squatters the other inaccessible at the end of an unmaintained road. These gleaming mills can process 300 tonnes of coffee per day, yet even during harvest season they do not run at capacity as farmers yields are so low. And that's the crux of the matter: more than ten years into the project, the coffee project sustains itself and no longer requires direct USAID, though key staff remain in place as advisors. The Fair Trade premiums from the 147 containers they exported last year pay for medicine to the coop's eleven health clinics. Yet each farmer only makes about $200 per year. The advisory staff who showed us around kept stressing this point--if they would only prune their trees, modernize their fields a little bit, their yields would go up, they could increase their yields, sell more coffee. Yet the farmers don't want to prune their trees--it would go against their animistic beliefs. So their trees, planted in 1928 under Portuguese occupation, grow to 10 feet tall, dropping cherries and reseeding into a dense, wild coffee forest.

There are no easy answers here. CCT has several administrative arms to their coop, including an entire "unit" dedicated to income diversification: shade trees and cash crops like teak and sandalwood, cattle fattening, vanilla are all enterprises that their USAID advisory staff are working to develop, trying to bring these impoverished people some other options. It’s a noble cause and it’s needed--with a low per capita income, high prices on imported goods and large families, these people need all the money they can get. Yet as we’re shown around, we don’t actually talk to farmers much. Our guide occasionally slips into the tone of a teacher, describing his recalcitrant pupils: If only they knew what was good for them, they’d get with the program.

It’s easy to pity the people of this small intensely green island nation. The mountains rise sharply out of the sea around a capital city still littered with debris from past strife. Evidence of a rough colonial history is everywhere. Yet our role as buyers is not to fix their lives, it’s to work at being fair trading partners, slowly working to create space for some balance in a relationship that historically has had none.

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