Producer Tatiana
Schrieber (right) picks coffee with Marta Gonzalez
Hernandez.
Climbing into the mountains with members of the Mutvitz coffee
cooperative, one is struck by how hard these farmers work. Most
coffee growers in this part of Chiapas, Mexico, live in ejidos
; that is, land held in common by the entire community, and
worked by individual families. Generally the village is located
in the center of the ejidal land, and the coffee fields
(usually 2 to 10 acres each) are spread out around it, high in
the moutains. Farmers must walk two, three, or more hours over
extremely steep terrain just to get to their fields.
The members of Mutvitz (Mutvitz is a Tzotzil word that means "mountain
of birds") do not shrink from hard work. Determined to obtain
a better price for their coffee, as well as to protect their own
health and that of their land, they abide by all the practices required
of them by CERTIMEX, the Mexican organic trade certifying agency.
These practices include composting; terracing; using "living
fences" of small trees and shrubs to protect their fields from
neighboring farms where chemical fertilizers and pesticides may
be applied; planting a variety of tree species within their coffee
fields to enhance biodiversity; and draining the water used for
washing the coffee beans into wells, so as to avoid sending the
run-off to mountain streams.
The depulping machine
is used to take the outer fruit off of the coffee bean.
Once, walking to a coffee field with a farmer in central Chiapas,
we lost the trail and I followed as best I could as he hacked his
way through thick tropical undergrowth using his trusty machete.
When we finally arrived at the field, the farmer proudly showed
me his work: he'd built individual terraces around each coffee tree
to prevent the torrential rains from washing precious topsoil down
the mountain. He'd gathered materials for compost—leaves, coffee
pulp, animal manure and beneficial weeds—and, after months of turning
the huge mounds, had applied several shovelfuls to each tree. He
kept the area around each tree cleared of weeds using only his machete.
He'd carefully regulated the amount of light by pruning the shade
trees at regular intervals. His entire family was involved in the
harvest, which requires many trips to the coffee field and back,
carrying the 100 pound sacks of coffee fruit (the freshly harvested
fruit is about the size and shape of a cherry) on their shoulders.
The women often carried a child on their backs as well.
The coffee is sun-dried
on patios like this. The coffee is sorted to remove
flawed or damaged beans before it is bagged and sent
on to be roasted.
For coffee farmers, the work does not stop with the harvest. Newly
picked coffee must be "wet processed" in the community.
First, a hand cranked machine is used to depulp the beans, removing
the outer fruit from the inner seed. Next, the beans must be soaked
and stirred in several changes of water over several days to begin
fermentation. Then the coffee is spread out on a concrete patio
to dry in the sun. The beans must be raked and turned daily, and
sometimes taken up and covered if rain comes. (In the Chiapas highlands
it's not uncommon to have rain ten months out of the year.) Finally
the dried green coffee beans are selected, with only the best beans
gathered for sale.
The sacks of beans are again hauled on farmers' backs, hoisted
into trucks and taken to the cooperative's warehouse for further
quality checking and weighing. Then they are reloaded onto trucks
to go to the beneficio , or dry-processing facility, where
the outer husk of the bean will be removed and the coffee will be
roasted.
The bags are stacked
and are ready to be transported to the cooperative warehouse.
For all the work involved, Mutvitz members and other Chiapas coffee
farmers I have met are always willing to take time out to notice
what's going on around them. On the way back from the field that
day, I asked the farmer to identify for me all the various bird
sounds we were hearing along the way. Appreciative of my interest,
he named them all, and also stopped to point out to me something
I'd never seen before—a tiny hummingbird nest hanging delicately
from an inner branch of a tree. Chiapas is home to 39 of the 55
species of hummingbirds native to Mexico. The coffee farmers, working
hard to preserve their livelihood and culture, are also protecting
critical habitat for birds.
I once asked Mutvitz farmers how much they thought their work was
really worth. What would be a really "fair" price? They
could only laugh. Ten dollars a pound? A hundred dollars a pound?
In the end it was impossible to put a value on their coffee, and
all that it means, grown below a craggy promontory called Mutvitz,
mountain of birds.
Visitors
trying out the depulping machine.
