I'm not getting you...

There’s a lot to be misheard when you start talking about cross-cultural/continental communication. This past week there were a few occasions where miscommunication led to frustration between several different parties. I’ll just list them off in no particular order and see if they can be tied together coherently at the end.

1. Getting soft copies to our auditors in Burkina Faso. This one probably comes as no surprise to anyone, but it turns out that sometimes when you try to send attachments from Cameroon to Burkina Faso things get complicated. Complication one – I don’t even bother trying sending things as attachments anywhere anymore, instead I put things into a DropBox folder, let them upload for a few hours, then ask my co-workers in the US to send them as attachments when they get them. (This kind of reminds me of the pseudo-GPS we probably all did back when Google maps was available but GPS devices weren’t- you know when you got lost with only a cross-street to let you know where you are and you called someone who could look up where you were on a PC to direct you street by street back on track). (Sidebar – The documents did eventually get to their final destination after Ben in VT pulled out all the stops and sent them by about 4 different avenues. It was serious...they even tried faxing them).

2. My fancy new phone (a T-mobile) with all sorts of cool features just can’t seem to connect to the internet despite all signs indicating that it should. This one made the above more frustrating as I felt like I ought to be better connected.

3. At the start of last week we were geared up to keep buying coffee with the word being that we were looking for another 24 tons from Oku based on projections from our buying partners. This was exciting since we have plenty of farmers and small buyers who still have coffee to sell and we were still offering the best price in town. Unfortunately, after starting to set a program for visiting different parts of the village the word came from the same partners that they didn’t want us to buy anymore. This change of course led to a series of unpleasant phone calls and meetings on the street where myself and Cassman had to disappoint a whole bunch of people (but really...unless you are some kind of big time speculator who sees a big shift in the coffee market on the horizon [which you aren’t if you live in Oku], just sell your coffee before the end of February).

4. Was supposed to meet my co-workers at a training meeting yesterday morning and could not get any information from or about them when they never arrived. Until late this morning I heard nothing due to bad network reception and a phone that met an untimely end in a latrine. Certainly I could have walked to where they stay to find out what was up, but it’s about an hour hike so it wasn’t feasible last night and frankly didn’t seem that urgent until just before they showed up at my own door. When you are cut off from a group of people like that you can feel like you’re out in space and extra weight is added to every decision, for example, ‘should I go get myself some lunch? What if they come by the house and I’m not there? I should wait. Should I go up there? But it’s so far, and what if they’ve gone out themselves or we pass each other on different paths...!?!’

On the flip side, here are some positive communication developments:

1. My Oku language is actually kind of getting somewhere. I’m nowhere near able to speak or comprehend it in a useful way, but I can string some sentences together and sometimes get myself understood. The people of Oku don’t have much practice speaking slowly for foreigners, so that’s a handicap.

2. Incidentally, I’m sometimes convinced that no one around here is that much better at

communicating with one another even using the local dialect than I am speaking whatever language I’m trying to use. I see this sometimes when after two people finish a discussion I didn’t understand I ask each of them what it was about and get almost polar opposite explanations. To be fair, much of this can be chalked up to willful misunderstanding/selective hearing that characterizes lots of the informal business deals that happen in a village like Oku.

3. Got to have about three nice conversations with people in the US in the past week: two with my parents and one with my boss Pierre (who will incidentally be traveling to Cameroon himself this week).

4. I have adopted a new strategy for getting people to my training meetings using SMS reminders. Yeah it costs a bit, but it is a very positive departure from my obstinate ‘I told you when the meeting was a month ago, why can’t you just remember it yourself’ attitude. Really, if getting someone to these meetings isn’t worth $0.10 to me (out of my expense budget no less) then I should probably re-evaluate the value of the meetings all together.

So, common threads? I kind of expected modern technology to be one, but not really, cell phones and the internet both disappointed and supported me and the Oku language isn’t really modern, though the efforts to formalize that are helping me so much in learning are only a few decades old. Language is always an underlying theme while working in Cameroon, so it is no surprise that a few items on my list are centered on it. One common feature among all those items above is patience and understanding. None of the frustrations can be solved by getting annoyed and the positive items generally stem from going the extra step to communicate effectively. So if I’m not getting you, the first thing I need to do is take a breath.

Too much sadness

This past week the team of Mocha Joe’s has been struck by two untimely and tragic deaths of loved ones. As a group split across the Atlantic Ocean we are doing our best to provide love and support to one another. As people are fond of saying here in Cameroon, ‘We are together’ (or ‘Nous sommes ensemble’) and that’s important.  For me in particular, while I am deeply saddened by the events and am going through my own process, I’m sound and healthy and no one needs to be worrying about me. 

Incidentally, this week we also received the news that our operation has been approved for Organic Certification. Something to celebrate, but it is just so overshadowed by the rest of the week’s events it hardly seems worth mentioning, but I want to take the chance to congratulate everyone that was involved in the process and say how proud I am that we got through so many different kinds of obstacles along the way.

Compost

Yesterday, I took a little break from the coffee buying rush to spend some time with one of our growers and their compost pile. This farmer and her husband let me tag along at the beginning of December when they were making a compost pile. The special ingredient in this particular pile was coffee chaffs, the leftovers of the pulping process, which was a bonus for me being the local coffee guy, but really I was just interested in seeing how one of the more savvy growers in the area views and executes compost production. I did need to bring up the process of turning the pile myself and frame it as a special request that we should do it, because otherwise this farmer would have been happy to leave the pile as it was and add what she got to her farm in a few more weeks.

During that first round of compost making we used a ‘lasagna’ method. This starts with a layer of sticks, branches, or whole corn stalks that aren’t going to break down too readily and will give some airspace at the base of the pile to provide some aeration. On this we placed layers of grass, coffee chaffs, goat dung, fresh weeds, and soil (respectively) which we repeated two times. We also added some urine for good measure and to provide some nitrogen and moisture off the bat. The process went pretty quickly and none of the steps took a lot of effort, which was partly because the pile was not very big, and that helps to make the process less tedious.

I’ve played with composting a little bit in the past and I have a pretty good understanding of the basics of the process, much of which I formally learned from Steve Solomon’s Organic Gardener's Composting. In reality though, while I can talk a good game, I’ve never made a real earnest attempt to make a good pile (never living in one apartment for more than 2-years at a time can kind of keep ambitions like that in check), so I’m happy to get to do work like this where I am tagging along with someone else’s project that I can check in on from time to time and know that they’ll be there to continue it if they choose.

That being said, I wasn’t sure what kind of compost this pile was going to produce. In my mind, having all the ingredients of compost well mixed seems important and this layering method, while easy to teach, would keep the ingredients segregated. When we started turning the pile yesterday, the top layer of grass (directly under a thin layer of goat dung) was pretty much untouched by the decomposition process, which seemed to confirm my suspicions, but as we got past that first grass layer the next 15 cm or so was well on its way towards becoming stable humus, so much so that I could understand why a person would feel like the product of the first round could be added to their farm. I’m hopeful that after this next round the change will be perceptible enough that it will convince the farmer that there is a significant difference between stable humus and the partly decomposed products we were looking at before.

A terrible case of Coffee Berry Disease (CBD)

My ulterior motivation is that I want to have some good compost around for producing compost tea. The idea is to ‘steep’ the compost to extract lots of the nutrients, bacteria, and fungi cultures into a solution of water that you can than apply to your plants as a foliar spray. Compost teas promote plant health by providing nutrients directly to the leaves (reasonably useful) and also by improving the vibrancy of the micro flora and fauna communities in the farm, which can reduce the impact of pathogens on the premise that the non-pathogenic organisms will compete with the bad guys for resources. We want to try applying a tea of this sort to the coffee plants to see if it can have any effect on reducing the dreaded black berry disease that plagues the farmers in this area.

Fewer links this week...disappointing I’m sure

The flip side of the world market is the local market. Here in Oku, we talk a lot about the world market. Farmers ask me very frequently what is going on with the world market or how the world market is affecting the price they are getting for their coffee. This is part of the reason I made myself write last week’s post, so that I would have something to say to them on that point. So far, my line has been essentially what I wrote before: Two bad years for South America raised the price and now an exceptional harvest is putting the price back down, but not so far as it was in the middle of the naughts, so let’s not be too discouraged, especially since demand is consistently outpacing supply lately. This seems to fly pretty well and leaves people satisfied if a little befuddled.

At the start of the buying season (that is early December or so), there was a lot of speculation in Oku. Many freelance buyers were offering prices from 800 to 1,000 F per kg (about $1.50 to $1.90 per pound). My guess is that they were basing their speculation on the prices of the past two years, because in the meanwhile the world market price was already very low, about the same as it is now (around $1.50 per pound), so these guys were setting themselves up for disappointment. In the same period, we hadn’t yet given a price per kilo because we were sitting on our hands waiting for the bigger players in the area (the Cooperative Union and OLAM-CAM) to call the tune and they were similarly dragging their feet, presumably because they didn’t want to open the season with a very low price.

Finally, after much anticipation, the Cooperative Union announced their starting price as 700 F per kg just in time for my return to the country. This signaled to us that we could go ahead and name our price and we did, starting at 725 F per kg. Our line has been that we are trying to get the coffee we need as quickly as possible, which is why we are offering the extra 25 F (which amounts to about $4 per bag of coffee; not nothing) and this is mostly true, but we have the ulterior motive of just wanting to give the farmers growing coffee in Oku the best price they can get without undermining our own business. So now we have some local competition, which is great, and makes the work here kind of exciting. One result of the competition is that the Cooperative Union raised their own price to match our own. I can only assume that this move was spurred by our work because there have been no significant changes in the world market price and from what I’m seeing farmers have been willing to sell, even if they grumble a bit at how the price has dropped since last year.

Weighing in at 85 kg, were he full of coffee, Cassman would fetch $130

You may be wondering why we are taking our cues from the Cooperative Union, when maybe we could afford to offer a higher price for coffee while still doing right by our own company. I’ve wondered the same. But what experience has shown us is that if we do set our own price without consideration for the other buyers in the area we can get ourselves into a heap of trouble both from those other buyers and farmers. Obviously the other buyers aren’t going to appreciate us inflating the local price. While we are buying farmer direct, they are selling onto the world market and thus they wouldn’t be able to match the price we could offer. And while we aren’t buying enough coffee to purchase everything produced in Oku we are buying a significant enough portion that we could severely undermine their business. Doing that could ultimately reduce the competition in the market that has been developing in Oku in the past decade and it is that competition that should support the farmer’s more than anything we can do as a single entity. On the other side of the equation, since we cannot buy all of the coffee in Oku, our inflated price couldn’t be extended to every grower which would lead to undesirable discrepancies in how much one farmer got for his coffee relative to his neighbor. This is a community/social concern. While we don’t necessarily seek to support existing power structures, we also don’t want to wantonly unbalance the egalitarianism that exists between small scale coffee producers here.

I’m certainly not going to claim that this is the perfect approach, and if the last paragraphs ring as me trying to justify something that isn’t quite right...well maybe...but we’re sincerely working on this. One way we are working on it is through the organic certification process. Given the limitations above, the organic certification provides something of an out for coffee pricing. By diverting organic coffee into its own marketing stream where we are the only player we have much more freedom in defining the price without upsetting other local interests (As above, if Cassman were filled with organic coffee he’d get $148, not too shabby). At the same time, we can’t include everyone in the organic program immediately and we still have to deal with that problem of neighborly egalitarianism so we can’t get out of control.

The Price of Coffee

Coffee prices are low this year, especially compared with last year, and this makes the job of a conscientious coffee buyer more difficult. For now I’m going to try to sort out, as much for myself as anyone who happens to read this, how the price changes that occurred in the past two years can be explained. Later (next post?) I’ll try to detail why low world market prices make the job of being a conscientious coffee buyer more difficult. 

As with other commodities, particularly agricultural commodities, price trends can be tricky and coffee has some peculiarities that make just understanding what you are looking at when you see a price on a per weight basis a little more convoluted. First, we have two kinds of coffee (Arabica and Robusta) and sometimes they’ll be lumped together and other times taken separately. In the world, Arabica coffee is produced in much higher quantity and Latin America dominates on this side. Cameroon was producing about 66 thousand bags (about  4,000 t) of Arabica in the mid 2000’s, though I will venture a prediction that Cameroon’s production will increase in response to some aggressive government programs for distributing new coffee plants. This is maybe a bold prediction since Cameroon’s Arabica production has actually been decreasing for the past four years or so, but I’m going to stick to it. 

Robusta production is concentrated more in South East Asia and Africa and Cameroon’s production is much heavier on the Robusta side (about 525 thousand bags (about 31,000 t) of Robusta in the mid 2000’s). Here in Oku, we’re talking about Arabica, the small side of the Cameroon market, but the big side of the world market. Aside from varietal concerns, something else to be careful about when looking at data concerning coffee production is the time frame involved. For coffee, harvesting, processing, and farm-gate sales occur over two different calendar years, so some financial reports will give information on a single calendar year or fiscal period which may not coincide with the rhythm of production. Feel free to ignore those subtleties for the next few minutes (I have). 

So let’s go into the story since 2010 with extreme brevity. Brazil is most certainly the 800-pound gorilla when it comes to Arabica producing about 2.5 million tons of Arabica coffee in the 2010/11 season about 4.5 times more than the #2 country, Colombia. Obviously, this gives Brazil a whole lot of clout when it comes to the world market price of Arabica coffee. Analysts fret over droughts, frosts, disease outbreaks, and all other forms of natural or man-made catastrophes that could reduce the Brazilian output. So apparently, from the start of 2010 until about March of 2011 based on speculation (and the eventuality) of a low yield from Brazil and many other Arabica producing nations the commodity price of coffee rose to a 14-year highof 306.25 cents per pound in the early part of 2011. Notably, these couple of short seasons also left the stocks of exporting countries at all time lows at the beginning the 2012/13 season (that would be this one).  Meanwhile, on the other side of the planet growers in Oku were able to enjoy the higher price as well and for two selling seasons were getting around prices between $2-3 per kilogram. 

It seems like the good times are over... Not really, the markets are just readjusting and Brazil is having a really good season (Brazil has this funny two year cycle of higher and lower coffee yields). Also, we can all take a great deal of heart in the fact that coffee consumption is steadily increasing as populations in emerging markets are getting a taste for the brew. So, maybe some farmers will be discouraged this year and some may even turn away from their coffee crop, but my hope is that the producers I’ve been working with the past year will stick in the game and take on the challenge of trying to sustainably increase their production in order to stay viable as coffee farmers for years to come.

Don’t Call it a Comeback...

Except that is exactly what it is. I’ll be quite brief in this post as I’m just getting back to Cameroon and settling in. I’m in the market as I usually am while posting, but writing this one on the fly. I came back to my apartment being absolutely coated in dust. The door and windows face the busiest street in Oku and we are knee deep in the dry season, so dust is the word on everyone’s lips. I hope to have the place back to it’s pre-departure state by the weekend.

The month I got to spend in the US was outstanding. Thank you to all my friends and family for making the time we had together special and for all the support you give me. Knowing that many of you are thinking of me on a pretty regular basis goes a long way to keeping my morale up while I’m here. I look forward to seeing you all again as soon as I can, and in the meanwhile hope we can keep in touch as best we can by whatever means takes your fancy.