It's in the Bag

The first certified organic coffee produced in Cameroon is now safely sitting in plastic/jute export bags waiting to be taken to Douala for export to the United States. The two kinds of bags are nested in each other with the jute bag on the outside covered with all the information needed to identify the product as organic and all the numbers and certificates the customs officials in Douala need to see on the other side. Within the jute, the coffee is stored in plastic, which is good for any green coffee which is at a good moisture content and wants to stay that way. Moisture contents are critical for good shipping, particularly avoiding mold damage, and a remarkable amount of my last two weeks has been taken up discussing the importance between a moisture content of 11 or 12% depending on whether the coffee is going to be specialty sorted or sorted only one time. (All of those discussions are particularly remarkable considering the number of times we read our moisture-meters at something like 13% then threw our hands up and said, ‘screw it, it can’t possibly be that high, let’s go ahead and mill it.’) Moisture-meters (meters of all sorts really) aren’t my favorite things in the world.

For the certified organic coffee, the plastic bags have another significance. Once the coffee is safely inside the plastic, for all intents and purposes, it is isolated from all the threats to its organic-ness. That means that once we have these bags all sealed up and ready for shipping we’re relieved from most of the pressure of keeping this coffee safe. Obviously we’re still careful and still follow the basic rules like having an isolated section of the mill for storage of the organic product and tracking the movement of the organic coffee, but let’s say a gale wind started blowing coffee all around the mill, well, I no longer stay up at night worrying about that.

Next step for this coffee: shipping. Next step for me: getting back to spending almost all of my time in Oku, recruiting new organic farmers, and continuing to work and train the farmers we’ve already got to increase the organic take we get next year.

Why I never get too angry when someone is late

 Essentially it’s because sometimes they’ve been detained by the police (aka gendarmes around here – don’t expect me to try to explain the various jurisdictions of police/military/government officials. Suffice to say, if you’re not one of them you might get detained by any of them). This happened to be the case today when I went to Mbessa to meet with one of our farmers. The plan had been that we would spend some time together setting up a grass bund on the most severely slopped part of his coffee field. I’ve wanted to do this with a whole slew of farmers for a while as a form of erosion control and mid-April is about the earliest the rains are dependable enough to consider transplanting anything.

As I arrived at the man’s house I was a little apprehensive because I had not actually reconfirmed the date with him for more than a week. More than three days between the setting of an appointment and the actual appointment makes meeting someone a bit of a crapshoot. So when I saw that the door of his house was closed I went from excited to get to try a new method of erosion control (geeky, right?) to annoyed that I had just taken a 500F moto ride then walked for 45 minutes only to be stood up. So I hung around the house for about 30 minutes thinking someone might come back then left when no one did. After walking about 300m the man’s wife appeared over the top of a hill and signalled for me to wait. What she had to tell me was that the man had been taken to the brigade (where the gendarmes live) the night before and was being held there. Now, I’ve never been into a prison or holding cell here in Cameroon, but plenty of my American friends have (for visits, I don’t think I know any Americans that have been held themselves...) and their reputation is deplorable; not Soviet gulag or Abu Grahb bad, but really unpleasant. This news switches me from annoyed to concerned. Which is the reason I never get too angry when someone is late: because nothing makes you feel more like a jerk than to be miffed with someone for mildly inconveniencing you when it turns out they themselves are in dire straits*.

I’ve still never actually seen a holding cell because when I get to the brigade the man on duty

Outside the Mbessa Gendarmerie

brought the man out to meet me in the reception room. He looked fine, if a little shaken up, and reasonably happy to see me. He explained that he had been taken in because a child had gotten their leg caught in an animal trap he had set. I’m not sure if setting a trap of that sort is in and of itself illegal or the way or place he had done it was important and who knows if anyone could cite the law that had been broken, but none of that was all that important because what the Brigade Commander wanted above anything else was to have the victim’s father and the man who set the trap come to an agreement themselves over how to sort the situation out. Eventually, each party had an older family member present to argue (discuss?) their case and by the time I left (I couldn’t stay til the conclusion) it seemed like they were narrowing in on a figure that would cover the medical, travel, and some miscellaneous expenses.

Informal/traditional justice like this is pretty normal around here and even the secular authorities will commonly defer to it. The gendarmes did charge the man a small fee or penalty (they kept calling it bail, but after I asked a few questions it was made pretty clear that he would never see that money again and they refused to give a receipt for it), so they aren’t completely out of the game, but otherwise they were just present to act as mediators between the parties. So score one for the Cameroon government I guess...it feels weird to be writing a mostly positive article on this topic.

* For those who, like me, are constantly concerned about the ravages of erosion on a sloping landscape like Oku or Mbessa’s, we did reschedule a time to make those grass bunds for next Wednesday, so have no fear.

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.