Advances I: The Plan

   This week we are getting ready to give out some advances to farmers in Oku and Mbessa. Advances are not peculiar to low-income farmers or countries like Cameroon (although the motivation behind them may be). During my work in greenhouse production in PA advances would happen up and down the production chain with the largest ones being given to us, the greenhouse, so that we could afford to purchase all the inputs needed (pots, soil, fertilizer, plants, etc.) since it would be a few months before we would see any money coming. This is standard operating procedure.

One of the local credit unions that also deals with school fees.

   In contrast, the time that advances are distributed in Oku has less to do with purchasing inputs and is more directly tied to the beginning of the school year and the need for school fees. School fees are one of the biggest financial outputs families around here have during the course of the year, the other notable ones being Christmas and, less predictably, death celebrations. All over the country you will see banks and microfinance institutions advertising loans for school fees and you’ll even hear people use school fees as an argument while haggling in the market for rice or potatoes (and it works, but not for me, I’ve tried).

   Our plan for advances comes from a ‘formula’ with three factors: past production, demand, and trust. Cassman and Philip have a pretty good idea of how many bags of coffee any farmer in Oku is going to produce and our advance is going to cover only a portion of that (maybe a third at most). Then there are some farmers who are more anxious to get an advance at this time of year. This is accounted for less explicitly than the production estimate. A farmer who really needs a loan is the guy who is going to ask for it while a guy with no school age children is less pressed this time of year and less inclined to approach you. Finally, trust is a critical factor in deciding who we will give an advance to. These advances are distributed very informally, no legally binding contracts, just a sheet we ask people to sign when they receive their cash. Sometimes when you go to collect from a farmer you made a loan to he has already sold it to some other jerk and you’re left high and dry. It’s a bad reputation to get and a hard one to shake, so at this point we’re confident (but not certain) that the names we have on our list belong to trustworthy people.

   This year we are going to add a fourth factor to our ‘formula’; we will be favoring farmers who are entering into our organic program. Mocha Joes is still going to be purchasing lots of inorganic coffee (something I need to remind myself to say more often as I get preoccupied with the organic program) but we want to use advances as a way to provide encouragement to farmers that are taking this chance with us.

   One thing that needs clarification: are these advances loans or purchases on spec? The difference would be the price that the coffee is ultimately sold for. Right now the price of coffee is low as it normally is at the start of the season. This is tied to the promise of a good harvest, low demand (most buyers aren’t active yet), the need for school fees, and only loosely to the world market price. As the season progresses, the price per kilogram will almost certainly go up, so a person purchasing coffee right now can get it cheap. So are we buying coffee now with these advances? No, we’re not. When we give a farmer 50,000 FCFA we aren’t buying coffee at the current price, we’re just giving an essentially 0% interest loan. When it comes time for us to collect our product we’ll have a 50,000 FCFA credit with that farmer, no more no less. From what I can gather, this is almost always to the benefit of the farmers and is the way it is done by all the parties that purchase coffee here in Oku. I hear that buyers are more ruthless elsewhere in the country but I can’t speak to those places.

   I’m hoping to get more insight into the process over the next week as we begin the distributions and will put them down in a follow-up to this post.

In Oku Ekuna means beans; Mucuna means Kevin's beans

   Something a little more ag related today. One of the requirements for organic certification is that a farmer can demonstrate that they are actively trying to improve the fertility of their soil. Farmers here in Oku don’t have a really strong grasp of nutrient cycling and the importance of replenishing all the nutrients that you take away from the farm during harvest. This makes sense when you consider the traditional strategy for tackling this problem in this part of the world was to practice shifting agriculture. Rather than managing a plot of land for long-term production when a grower saw that their yields were declining they’d move on to a new piece of land and let the exhausted plot regenerate, maybe over a few decades. Enter population pressure and perennial crops like coffee and this strategy is no longer viable.

   Chemical fertilizers are one solution to this problem (the solution of choice in many parts of the world) but not if you want to be an organic grower. When we are going around discussing organic practices with farmers we usually give them a list of input options for improving or maintaining soil fertility including compost, animal manure, and green manure (what we call green plants with good nutrient content). My personal favorite of these options is green manure coming in the form of cover crops. Compost is excellent, but requires quite a bit of labor. Also, with the piecemeal nature of many farming activities here it is hard to find a time when there is enough material available to make a good sized compost pile. Most of the suggestions about using animal manure come from parts of the world where animal manure is so abundant that it can actually become a nuisance. While there are quite a lot of goats and chickens around Oku, they are usually allowed to wander freely enough that collecting their manure is a lot of work and not a no-brainer solution.

Some mucuna seeds about to be planted.

   So cover crops: they grow exactly where you want to use them and if you choose the right species, can provide an impressive amount of nitrogen. The other benefits we hope to gain from a good cover crop are weed suppression and high biomass production. Finally, a good cover crop is going to be easy to maintain, easy to propagate, and will grow well in the shade of a coffee field. To this end, I picked up a couple of kilograms of Mucuna pruriens seed the last time I was in Bamenda. Mucuna has a good reputation as a companion crop for coffee, meeting almost all the criteria listed above. My greatest concerns are with the easy to maintain and nitrogen fixing points. Mucuna is a type of bean (aka velvet bean) and I’m worried that it could become a nuisance if it has a tendency to climb the stems of the coffee plants. Of course, if it also accomplishes weed suppression it may be a welcome trade-off to detach climbing mucuna in place of weed clearing.

   Nitrogen fixing is a concern because, as far as I know, mucuna has not been established here in Oku before. This can be a problem because in order for a nitrogen fixing plant to accomplish that task it needs to form an association with a specific type of soil bacteria (one species of bacteria to each species of plant). If the bacteria that mucuna works with is present, then we’re in luck, but if not then we’ll miss out on that benefit. We could potentially ameliorate that situation by bringing in some of that bacteria and inoculating the seed before sowing, but let’s hope we don’t need to do that.

   Right now I’m trying to find two farmers who are willing to try growing this mucuna in their farm. I don’t want to hand out lots of small amounts of seed because I don’t think anyone will gain much from that kind of experience. Also, to try to increase the person’s commitment to these plants, I’m asking that they pay 2,000 F for about a kilogram, which is half of what I paid in Bamenda. It would be nice to find farms with fences in place so that we can protect the mucuna from goats as it is being established, but I’m not going to be such a stickler on this point. One of our farmer partners has already stepped up and planted his seeds this past weekend, but finding a second is taking a little more effort. With the dry season approaching, I’d like to get these seeds in the ground as soon as possible so that they can be well established before they have to deal with that stress. I’m excited to see how this little project pans out and will certainly give updates as things develop.

Here, There, Yaoundé

   This past week I started a little trip to Bamenda on Tuesday in order to meet with Philip and plan out our next steps following the completion of the field visits. We are hoping to start organizing regular training sessions with each of our farmer groups and we also needed to discuss how we are going to handle delivering advances to our farmers. Advances are a standard part of doing business here and I’ll take some time to describe what we end up doing with that after I’ve had a chance to see it myself.

First things first upon arriving home.

   I was planning on traveling back to Oku on Thursday, but Wednesday night I received a text from Pierre telling me that there was an inspector from our certifying agency passing through Yaoundé in the next day or two. Funnily, about one year ago, when I first came to Cameroon I had a very similar experience: my boss calling from another country with a sudden assignment to head to Yaoundé for some kind of meeting. This time the pace was a lot more leisurely and I didn’t take a night bus (which I actually refuse to do now), but in both cases I didn’t pack nearly enough pants (this time two would have sufficed, oh well). 

   So I got to Yaoundé on Friday and the inspector (Teresa) and I arranged to meet in the evening. In the afternoon I checked in to my hotel, organized my thoughts and the questions I wanted to ask later that night, then took a nice walk around the city to stretch out after the bus ride and get some dinner (grilled fish, good city food). After that I went to meet Teresa, so not a ton of time for sightseeing, unfortunately.

   Our meeting was essentially a very pleasant conversation about what we have accomplished so far as an Internal Control System (ICS), what work we still have to accomplish, and Teresa’s opinions and advice on some of the less obvious problems that present themselves to people like us. As we spoke, I got a familiar feeling of anticipation and apprehension that I think is pretty much identical to the feeling I used to get at the start of every college semester when the professors would present the syllabi and I’d look forward to all the information we’d cover but also wonder how I’d get all the assignments done in time. At least there are no $150 textbooks to buy in this case.

   On the side of being encouraging, it seems like the field visits were done well. We collected the right sorts of information and we were getting them done at a pretty good pace (45-90 minutes, about the same time we’ll expect to use for our Internal Inspections). Similarly, the spatial distribution of our farms doesn’t seem to be any problem. I had been worried that we might be spreading a little far for our small staff, but Teresa’s experience tells her we shouldn’t worry about it. In all, it seems that we have a good jump on much of the documentation and organization we need to have in place.

   On the other hand, it seems that almost nothing we have started could be considered complete at this point. Frustratingly, it may be the case that these are the sorts of things that are never completed; rather, they are amended and refined for as long as the program is in place, dangerous for someone with a perfectionist streak. Looked at it a different way this is freeing; we can leave some pieces only partially formed and let time and circumstance complete them later. For example, Teresa and I agreed that we can simply leave our ‘Allowed Input’ list blank at the start as there are no purchased inputs our farmers are in the habit of using that aren’t strictly prohibited.

   The most distressing revelation is that Teresa does not regard our strategy of encouraging farmers to change part of their production to organic and keep part as conventional (a way to hedge the bet) as wise from a certification standpoint. It seems like we may have to return to quite a few farmers to encourage them to convert all of their holdings or maybe find another place to process their inorganic coffee. In any case, this part won’t be fun for me as it will mean I need to reverse something I said earlier.  When the time comes to talk about this, I certainly hope I have something positive to bring to the table at the same time.

   Finally, our discussion changed my perception of the relationship between our ICS, the farmers, and our certifier. If there are two major responsibilities between those parties, (1) ensuring the farms are up to the organic standard and (2) ensuring that the farms are well monitored and evaluated, I had seen those responsibilities mostly resting on the ICS and the certifier, respectively. In the last few days, the responsibilities migrated down the chain so that it is really in the hands of the farmers to keep their farms up to snuff and in our hands to watch and evaluate them, with just occasional oversight from the certifier. The ICS will be ready for that second shift, but I think some of our farmers would agree with my old view on the first. Remember, no coffee farmers in Oku asked for someone to come along and certify them as organic growers. It is important that our staff is on the same page and very clear about the expectations a farmer is going to be held to and in the next few weeks we’ll be separating the true believers from the opportunists.

Risk Assessment

   Just like in any other work, we get a lot of tools or processes (mechanisms?) that get vague names or acronyms assigned to them. Something I daydream about is what would a person come up with if you were to lock them in a room and tell them they can’t come out until they have produced a [fill in the blank]. Business plan and sales model are two terms that have always done that to me. I wonder, could I write a business plan right now? Is there a specific format, or can I just wing it? Do I need a business degree or MBA? These are all things I daydream about, seriously.

   One process that we are going through is a risk assessment of our Internal Control System. Having gone through this exercise, I actually feel kind of the opposite, at least regarding this form that our potential certifier gave to us. If you locked me in a room and told me to make you a risk assessment I’d probably put down just about the same information they asked for. General categories of risk (when things can go wrong), specific sources of risk (what would go wrong), the current situation on the ground, and what we’re doing to keep the bad things from happening. As an example, in the category of processing, we have the comingling of organic and inorganic products, which is about a medium to high risk factor since we have a facility that will be processing both organic and inorganic products. To mitigate the risk, my suggestion is that we have our mill operators fill out a checklist any time they are going to switch from milling inorganic to organic coffee so that we will have documentation that the machines and equipment were cleaned thoroughly.

Hard to protect from uphill contamination on 

a 45 degree incline.

   Looking over the risks has led me to reorder a few of my priorities. Some of the highest risk factors are real nuts and bolts kind of things, like that issue with the mill equipment: which to me is solved by a one page Word doc with some checkboxes. Not quite as sexy as green manure cover crops or compost piles (yup, just called compost sexy) but to get our certification it is the kind of thing our auditors are going to want to see. Some of the other points that have asserted themselves are the frequently very indistinct borders between many of our farmer-partner’s fields and their neighbors’. This presents a risk of spray drift, fertilizer run-off, or a variety of other flavors of contamination. How do we mitigate? We’re working on it, and hopefully we can get some ideas from our auditors. Buffer zones seem to be a likely answer, but I’m not a huge fan of telling farmers that they need to put berries from this line of trees in this bag with a green check and berries from the next in a different bag, marked with a red X. Monitoring and assuring compliance of such a thing would be momentous. Where’s the Word doc for this one?

   I have a tendency toward over-complicating things, so ‘keep it simple stupid’ has been a mantra during this piece of work.  I’m looking forward to getting feedback from my partners and co-workers on some of the brainstormy ideas I’ve thrown out for risk mitigation strategies. I’m hoping they can show me clearer paths in a few cases.

North West v. West

   Not a Frisbee game this time (unfortunately), just some (brief) musings on the differences between the culture in the North West Region and the West Region. The short time I’ve able to spend in either of the regions doesn’t really qualify me to make many statements on their differences, but my recent trip back to Mbouda and Bafoussam did get me thinking about the contrasts.

   The most obvious difference is the language. After the First World War, when the Germans’ holdings in Africa were split up among the allies, the West Region (WR) was colonized by the French while the North West Region (NWR) was allotted to the English. The language split still exists pretty starkly along these lines. Cameroonians take a great deal of (justifiable) pride in the fact that they live in a bilingual nation (for some reason they never count the 240 odd local dialects in that assessment) but of course individuals differ widely in how much of any language they speak. To make a blunt (and ready to be contradicted) statement, I would say that Anglophones in the NWR are more likely to speak passable French than Francophones in the WR are likely to speak English. This is probably due to the dominance of French in the political and economic life of Cameroon. On the other hand, outside of larger cities, the English isn’t really English at all but Pidgin while the French isn’t quite what a Parisian would speak, but close.

   After spending a little time in a village, another difference is the degree to which traditional culture is observed (in this aspect cities are kind of left out, as they are cultural mash-ups to begin with). In the WR I attended a range of traditional ceremonies including a wedding, some burials, and a harvest festival. During these events people will wear their traditional dress and carry out the proscribed rites and for a foreigner it is a big cultural adjustment. In the NWR you will find the same ceremonies being celebrated in a very similar manner, but what has taken me some time to adjust to is that when the ceremonies are over, the traditional social structures are not so quickly put aside. For example, in both the WR and NWR there are individuals who an uninitiated person is not supposed to touch (e.g. Chiefs or Fons, some members of their family, family heads, etc.). In the WR I was never actually called out on this, but it has been a semi-constant source of social anxiety for me here in Oku. Adherence to this kind of social taboo in daily life differentiates my experience of the WR and NWR.

Ba Tutuwan of Bali with one of his wives. Note the red feather in his cap, this is a good hint that you shouldn't try to shake his hand.

   This is not to say that the population of the WR has overthrown their traditional social structure, but it is less noticeable in a day to day way. One person who I pointed this out to suggested that the explanation could again be drawn from the days of colonial rule. The French, in control of the WR, practiced direct rule. Their own people came to the country to fill top government positions and they made sure the people knew that it was them exercising power in the country. On the other hand, the British practiced an indirect rule. They used alliances and agreements with traditional leaders to exercise their will in the colonies. So when a citizen in the NWR looked to the top of the power structure they still found their Fon while in the WR he would have seen that the Prefet was the man calling the shots.

   The realities of these differences in social order are significant way beyond just the occasional faux pas. Social mobility, bureaucratic efficiency, education systems, and the strength of para-statal structures (e.g. coffee cooperatives) are all manifestations that I and my ex-pat friends (Peace Corps Volunteers, to be frank) have observed. Certainly there are lots more, some more or less important, and if anyone wants to add to the list feel free. On the other hand, if anyone wants to call me out for being shortsighted or completely wrong, that’d be appreciated too.

Field Visits Part 2: The Walk

   So we are still in the midst of doing our field visits, and up to this point we have met with over 40 farmers who have more than 60 fields of coffee in Oku and the neighboring village Mbessa. I’m expecting that we may be able to meet with about 20-25 more farmers in the next week to round out tho ones we are going to work with here in 2012. This week I actually had to put a little delay in our schedule of field visits in order to return to where I used to work in the West Region to sort out an issue with my immigration status (here’s to not getting deported!!!), but as of Monday of next week we will be right back to it. In the meanwhile, I’m also taking the opportunity of being out of Oku to keep up some social connections here in the West, meet with other players in the world of Cameroon coffee, and do a little research into the availability of seeds for good cover crop plants.

   Last post I described our interview process, this time I want to tell you about the second part of the farm visit, which is the field walk. Following the interview we know how many fields each farmer has either under coffee or other crops and which of those fields they want to try to have certified. For our field walks we only focus on that last category: coffee fields to be certified. The rest we obtain information for, but do not need to visit individually. We leave the house with our trusty tape measure (which we are beating the hell out of) and find the first edge of the nearest field to be certified. There are always three people (e.g. me, Cassman or Gilbert, and the farmer), though a fourth makes the process easier so if there is a child handy we make good use of them. One person will hold the measure in place, the next guy pulls the tape along the border, the owner of the field will direct so that we don’t’ miss the sometimes impossible to detect borders between fields, and I sketch out a little map of the area.

   What we want to remember from these visits is the orientation of the field and all of its borders, the orientation of the slope, the crops being grown adjacent to the coffee, the intercrops, and any out of the ordinary features we can spot (one guy has a CamWater treatment plant in the middle of his field, I’m curious how our certifiers are going to find that). Pretty simple, but I’ll tell you that the physical nature of the work is a little daunting. The thing about the borders of fields is that they are often the least visited place in a field, and usually aren’t meant to be walked along. So whether you’re ducking through brambles, wading through a marsh, or stepping precariously along a ledge you always want to be on your toes. I trip and fall about 1.6 times per field, and I am without exception going to be the dirtiest person when we leave the field (bear in mind, that has been true in almost every job I’ve had, even lab work). After we get this information, I bring it back to my computer and try to include it on our big map of Oku/Mbessa which shows the locations of all our partner’s farms around the village and is starting to get much fuller than I expected it to be.

   One important aspect of these visits that really only occurred to me after about 2-weeks of doing them is that this is our first chance to show our farmer-partners how serious (NB serious is a word used a lot here, to be called serious is a great compliment, telling someone they are not serious should not be taken lightly) this program and us field officers are. By being very thorough during our interviews and field visits, I am hoping that we are demonstrating the kind of organization and professionalism that we are going to need everyone involved in this project to display in order for it to be successful. Much of the time I feel like I am being the bad cop in our team, trying to keep expectations realistic and discourage anyone from entering into the program lightly, a role I’m pretty comfortable with. This is a topic I’ll certainly get back to in the future and would love to get feedback on, but for now I’ll finish by asking this, is it right to get people interested in a program like this by presenting them with the simplest possible interpretation of it?

(In this case, that would be ‘if you don’t use any agrochemicals you can be certified as organic’)

Field Visits Part 1: Interviews

   The Cassman and I got started on our field visits this week. These visits are the first step in getting farmers and their fields registered in Mocha Joes' Internal Control System. During the visits, we are learning about each farm individually and getting a more concrete idea of how farming, coffee farming in particular, is being practiced here in Oku. With this information we will be able to complete our application as an ICS and also register our farmer partners in the program.

    The visits happen in two parts: interview and field walk. The interview takes about 10 or 15 minutes and we ask the farmer about the fields he manages, what he is growing on each, and when was the last time he used any agrochemicals on them. There is certainly a presence of inorganic fertilizers and herbicides here in Oku, although pesticides for controlling insects or fungus are almost entirely absent. That is a little surprising, since the greatest complaint among farmers is the loss caused by the coffee berry disease, a symptom of infection by the fungus Colletotrichum kahawae. In general, the use of fertilizer is mostly in maize fields and has not been practiced widely for coffee since the late '90s. When farmers have used fertilizers in their coffee fields in the past three years it was offered at a subsidized rate by the government or a development agency.

    Our interviews also cover the handling of coffee after harvesting, so we are finding that most farmers do not have their own pulping machines but need to borrow or rent them. On the other hand, for as many people who tell me that there are not enough pulpers around Oku, no one we have interviewed has told me that they had a problem finding one when they needed it in the past. Next we discuss storage of organic products. To my surprise, when I ask to see where people will be keeping their organic coffee, most will bring me to their bedroom. After seeing that, it seems a little unnecessary to tell people that they should not store agrochemicals in the same room (who wants to sleep next to a bottle of glyphosate?), but who knows, right? A bag of fertilizer may make a nice pillow.

    One aspect of the interviews that makes me a little uncomfortable is that I get the impression people are trying to impress. So when I ask if they have ever used fertilizer in a certain field, they will emphatically answer no. With a little pressing, the farmers let you know that they used to use fertilizer in the past, so when they said no they meant 'not recently'. I don't like that sort of ambiguity but as I am getting to do more of these interviews, I'm learning how to better phrase the question and reassure farmers that we are not here to trap them in a lie or met out any punishments. In time, as our mission becomes more familiar those sorts of misunderstandings should become less common.