Last week we were visited by our external auditors, EcoCert.
They sent a team of two people: Jean-Pierre, whom I mentioned before as the man
who would be acting as our primary inspectors, and Aziz, the manager of the
EcoCert office in Burkina Faso who was really more interested in observing the
work of JP than us, but also contributed some questions here and there.
It was a three and a half day event that saw me move back
and forth from Oku to Bamenda a few times, which is a blast. The end result is
that we are technically denied right now, pending some changes we need to make,
none of which should be terribly difficult for us (mostly questions of
documentation). The most obtrusive is that we need to make an effort to prove
that our farmers have actually undergone the three year transition period which
is a pre-requisite for producing a certified product. There is a precedent that
a farmer can use the three years prior to when they apply for certification as
this conversion period if they can provide sufficient evidence that they did
not use any unallowed chemicals. In our situation, since our farmers are not in
the habit of keeping records, we are going to rely on their formal attestation
of their field history backed up by an assurance from the local Chief of the
Agricultural Post (the Cameroon equivalent of a state extension agent in the
US) that their statement is true. Again, precedent is apparently on our side
with this. More importantly, as far as I can tell it is the truth that all of
our farmers have abstained from using unallowed inputs on the farms we are
seeking certification for. It would be a shame that these people would miss out
on this opportunity on a technicality.
Throughout our inspection, all of us (me, Philip, Cassman,
Gilbert, and the farmers) were impressed by the manner JP and Aziz conducted
themselves and their investigation. At the first farm we visited together, JP
asked me to perform a ‘mock’ inspection, since we had already done the official
one the week before. He observed me and afterward gave me some critiques. Some
were positive (and as a testament to his skills as a teacher/manager he started
with these) and some were constructively critical. Mostly, he encouraged me to
change the way I ask questions in order to open them up and let the farmers
explain more to me about how they are managing their farms. Hearing this, I
couldn’t help but agree, but also had the thought in my head that maybe that
kind of questioning wouldn’t work with these particular farmers. That was a
foolish thing for me to think. Over the next two days, JP showed that you can
get just about any information you want from a farmer with very simple, very
open questions. Something along the lines of, “So how do you take care of your
farm?” could lead to about 10 minutes of explanation that would have taken me
an hour to pry out of these guys. I’ll be trying to put this into practice more
myself and I’ll probably have more to say on it later.
Something else we were impressed by was the responses of our
farmer partners. A few times, JP directed a question that made me flinch to one
of our farmers, for example, “What have you learned from these people?”
Expecting painful silence, I was pleasantly surprised when each time the
response came back pretty darn close to something one of us actually said. This not only made us feel great during the inspection, but made
us all feel better about the training program we are trying to initiate here
and gave us more confidence in the abilities of our partners, an invaluable
thing.
In the next week or so we will be rushing about, telling the
growers the news and making sure that they have implemented the corrections we
gave them during the internal inspections. If they have, then they get to start
harvesting their coffee as organic, which is something special. There is still
no guarantee that the coffee will actually make it to the US as USDA Certified Organic,
which depends on us fulfilling the corrections EcoCert gave us, but we’re ready
to take that bet.
No comments:
Post a Comment