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.

Wait, you're a what?

   Anyone who has studied or read-up on the topic of rural development, especially international rural development has seen lists of reasons for why one community is lagging behind the rest in terms of quality of life. The laundry list will generally include the following (students of rural development take note): Poor transport infrastructure, Poor communication infrastructure, Disease epidemics, Wars/Civil unrest, Corrupt government officials, Degraded soils, International trade barriers, etc... In these lists, there is another common character who is probably one of the more vague and enigmatic boogey-men of underdevelopment, a man we like to call the Middle-Man. The Middle-Man (Mr M for short) is a lazy good for nothing who buys from vulnerable farmers at give-away prices and resells without adding any value to a product, except maybe to transport it to a better market town, and laughs all the way to the bank.He is blamed for keeping markets dis-integrated and taking a much greater share of the final market price of an agricultural commodity than the primary producer.

   So with this concept in my mind of what a Middle-Man is, you can imagine my surprise when this week a friend described his goat business to me. In addition to keeping and selling some of his own goats, this man purchases goats in the morning of each market day (every 8 days in Oku) then re-sells them to traders who come in from larger cities later in the day. If you didn't get how that worked, I'll make a diagram, see Figure 1 transactions a and b. From what I've been taught, that's what Middle-Men do, and it is bad. This all takes place in the same spot each market day, about 300 meters from the main market. He can apparently make about a 2,000 Franc (~$4) profit per goat, so most market days he'll take between 6,000 and 10,000 Francs. Keep in mind that 2,000 Francs is considered a very decent days pay by most people in Oku.

   Now what I have to ask is why doesn't the man who sold the goat in the morning wait a couple of hours and sell it for 2,000 Francs more later in the day (See figure 1 transaction '?')? Here's how that question gets answered (from my memory and put into clearer terms):

Me – So why do they sell to you if they could sell for more later in the day?

Friend – They couldn't get more later in the day.

Me – Why not? You do.

Friend – But these traders from Douala wouldn't give them the same price. Farmers know that they would get taken advantage of, but they trust me. They sell to me for a higher price than they could get from those traders from out of town.

Me – So you pretty much run the goat market for Oku?

Friend – There are 8 of us who are partners.

Me – What if someone doesn't want to sell to you, they want to try selling direct to the men from out of town?

Friend – They can do that, but any man who comes from out of town knows that he only has to come to us and he can get goats.

   How does this change my view of 'Middle-Men'? Well, my friends not a bad guy from what I know of him and really it seems that what he is doing is what is best for the Oku community. Instead of having individuals all trying to sell their goats to out-of-towners, probably undercutting each others prices in the process, the market is centralized, giving a greater advantage to the seller (My friend). As a member of the community, my friend is acting under social pressures that oblige him to offer reasonable prices for goats and once the goats are in his possession it is in his interest to get the best price possible from those out-of-towners. 

   It can be a fine line between providing a service and exploiting an unwary farmer. Perhaps more money is actually getting to Oku because of my friend's goat market than would be if it wasn't there. I won't be doing any serious investigations into the matter, but I imagine that as the coffee buying season approaches I'll start to see a lot of similar commercial activity surrounding the purchase of dried beans and it won't be easy to see when that line is being crossed. We'll be doing our best to be sure we can stay safely on the service side of things.

Salt is to pepper as 'Development' is to ...

Meetings!!! Cause that's what we do.

   Oku is where I sleep now. I have an apartment with a parlor, small kitchen area, bedroom, and shower. The latrine is outside, about 25 meters away. It isn't covered yet so when it rains it is not a comfortable place to be. I'm hoping that the landlord gets on that sooner than later.

   What we've been doing this week is re-visiting the farmer groups that we made contact with two weeks ago when Philip was here. As I am trying to be the person doing most of the communication, I tried to keep the meetings small (2-3 people), but that didn't really work out. Most of the groups Cassman and I spoke to were between 10 and 20 people and in the end Cassman or someone else acted as my translator taking my 'strong' English into the Oku language.

   The items covered in each meeting were the organization of Mocha Joes Organic Growers, the rules (or by-laws) or being an organic grower, and setting a program for our field visits which is the real first step toward certification. In describing the organization of Mocha Joes Organic Growers, I used a flow chart as a visual aid (I'm pretty sure I've seen charts like this used to describe organizations here in Cameroon in the past). To make it more understandable I drew the chart for each group piece by piece, describing the roles and responsibilities of each person as they were added. Everyone was very attentive as I was speaking and I'll have to assume that Cassman was doing a good job of translating, but in the end the information may or may not have been effectively conveyed. What are some good ways to check for comprehension in a small group? Asking questions in an exercise like this doesn't seem quite appropriate, I would feel like I was being condescending. My brother, the high school math teacher, gave me the advice 'You just need to speak louder than anyone else in the room, that way, even if people don't understand you, they think you know what you're talking about' (he was joking). Of course being a white person here has essentially the same effect, even if you were to whisper.

   The next steps are going to depend on our team (Philip, myself, and Cassman) to start our field visits. After getting some experience with them we will be better able to divide ourselves to get the most of our time. In the meanwhile I'll be spending some of my time visiting the farms of our members to get myself some exercise and become more comfortable on these coffee farms. I guarantee there will also be a meeting or two thrown in, just to be safe.

First Visit to Oku

   This week, Philip (Mocha Joes Director in Cameroon) and I traveled to Oku village. The journey took about 3 hours from Bamenda and takes you over two ridge lines, providing some breath taking views of the valleys below with steep green hillsides spotted with boulders and sheer cliffs. Oku village itself is situated in a horseshoe shaped valley with the open end facing east and Mount Oku (the second highest peak in Cameroon) situated to the south.

   Around the valley, houses and compounds are spread out with a few clusters of larger buildings where you can find shops to buy food, get a moto repaired, or recharge your credit. Above most of this is the largest market area, Elak, where you can find the bus station and plenty of commercial activity (even a cyber cafe, which I'll be making use of once I'm up there). While the highest parts of the valley are dominated by forests with an assortment of tree and shrub species that you don't find elsewhere in Cameroon, the rest is heavily cultivated with Irish potatoes, onions, maize, beans, bananas/plantains, taro, yam, etc. (pretty much standard field crops for Cameroon). Then there is the coffee. Much more coffee than I am used to seeing, especially from my time in the West Region. Coffee is planted throughout the valley; sometimes in small clusters and in a few cases in areas up to about one hectare. Generally, it is being grown under some kind of shade, but frequently that is only a small number of trees which may or may be well tended. Similarly, the coffee itself ranges from looking healthy, well-pruned, and the fields well cleared to a minority of fields looking neglected. Most fall somewhere in the middle, generally toward the better cared for side.

   Our work in the two and a half days we were in Oku was to meet with farmers groups in quarters across Oku and the neighboring village Mbessa. Philip and I managed to hold seven meetings with the help of our friend Kenneth (better known as the Cassman) and Gilbert organized several others in Mbessa on his own. In the end we were able to communicate with well over 100 coffee farmers. Our goals were to introduce ourselves (me for the first time, a re-introduction for Philip who has met many of these individuals as a representative for Mocha Joes and in his previous work in the coffee trade) and the organic program we want to initiate. The pitch we adopted highlighted the economic benefits a certified organic farmer could claim and the how the use of organic methods can protect the health of the farmer and consumer. We also stressed that every coffee farmer in the village is being invited to the program voluntarily, even if they are currently using fertilizers or other chemical and won't be certified 'organic' in this first year.

   The men and women who attended these meetings had many questions about the practicality of organic growing versus conventional. Philip and I did our best to explain that for any chemical or extensive growing strategy there is an effective organic alternative. In the end, most people seemed convinced that if they were not currently using any chemical inputs, it would be good for them to apply to the program and people who are using inputs thought it would be a good idea to enter some, but not all, of their fields into the program. Philip and I agreed that this would be a good course and a good way to 'hedge their bet' in trying organic growing.I am particularly happy that many farmers see splitting their fields as a way to protect themselves from a risky new idea because it shows that they have realistic expectations and do not expect the fields converted to organic to immediately out perform their other fields without additional investments of capital and labor.