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.

Expectations

As I’ve been back in the US for about a week, I’ve been answering a lot of questions for friends and family about what life is like in Cameroon and how different life is between the two places. (People also ask what it is I do over there, so apparently this blog was not as well advertised as I had thought it was) People want to know if I’m going through a lot of ‘counter-culture’ shock, like is it disorienting to see so many cars or such huge markets or so many white people all at once. To answer briefly, it is. To answer the question a little more comprehensively, it’s not as though I forgot what life was like in the US but I certainly got used to living a different way.

I am realizing that when I return to Cameroon, I am going to be re-entering with a very different set of expectations than I first arrived with. Landing in Africa, I was probably expecting something out of Gulliver’s travels. People walking on their hands or talking hippopotami, perhaps. When you start off expecting such oddities and are really only faced with a few different ways to cook and eat corn, some creative (or old-timey) solutions to living without electricity/running water/personal transportation, or variations on the theme of ‘existing power structures’ (which essentially amount to, some people have it [and want to keep it], some people don’t [and want to have it]) the relative bizarreness gets downgraded.

Additionally, by the time I left the US in 2011, I had gotten my life to a point where I felt pretty comfortable with my lifestyle and carbon footprint (then I got on a plane...) and I had already shunned or tried to do without many of the modern conveniences my friends and family figure a person would miss most. Seasonal food choices were already a part of my life; if I wasn’t renting a fairly small apartment I probably would have had a composting toilet; I used public transport and/or craigslist rideshares to get just about anywhere; I got most of my clothes from the Salvation Army (and the clothes market in village is essentially the same thing). So I was maybe a little less disposed toward the initial shock.

That being said, what jumped out at me soon after arriving back in PA is the aesthetic choices that are taken for granted here but do not hold the same prominence in Cameroon. The appearance of lawns, flower beds, paintings on the walls, furniture, architecture styles, public green space, and so on are all choices that people make on a daily basis with an eye towards form as much as function. The range of options available is wide enough to let anyone express themselves (though most people stick to a pretty conventional pallet). From what I have seen in Cameroon people would make interesting and unique choices but are very limited both in time and materials. Occasionally you’ll catch someone dressing up the area around their home with some trees and flowers just for the sake of a little color, just not as ubiquitous as I’m seeing now. Similarly, everyone in Oku is happy to get their hands on a new calendar or photo to put on their wall to liven up their living room, but a print or oil-painting is pretty much out of the question. (Incidentally, I did pick up a few oil paintings from a Kumbo artist named Jean Samuel Mfikela and they have gotten a good reception from friends and family)

On the flip side, I got a few good reminders that frustrations are not unique to the African continent. In the past week, my parents have been going through a series of complicated hoops to make settlement on a new house. A complicated process, no one would argue that, but when I hear that the process is being held up because a document in one lawyer’s office needs to be signed by another lawyer, both of whom have internet connections, mobiles phones, fax machines, and access to three private document delivery services in addition to the United States Postal Service, one gets the feeling that it isn’t just a question of technology when it still takes a few days to get that signature. In a similar vein, my sister’s fiance (an Irish bloke) was navigating his own immigration adventure at the US embassy in Dublin recently and got pushed back a full day because he didn’t bring a self-addressed postage paid envelope with him to his morning meeting with the officials there. So for as many times as I and my friends and co-workers get into a snag and want to throw our hands up and say, ‘well, that’s Cameroon for you,’ it was nice to be reminded that maybe we ought to just say, ‘well, that’s living in the 21^st century for you,’ instead.

A Brief Respite

In one weeks’ time I’m going to be flying back to the US for a month long break. I’m very excited about it. After that, I’ll be returning to Oku to keep working on the organic coffee program for another year. During the last couple of months of that year I’ll be working to phase myself out of the program and train someone to replace me. Since I’m about to leave for a few weeks, this is not a great time to start new things, but there is still so much untapped potential here in Oku that I think I’ll just write a list of some things I hope to accomplish in the next year. Here goes.

1. Get the volume of organic coffee produced in Oku up to 9 tons (from the 3ish we are hoping for this year).

2. Revisit all of the farmers that we interviewed for field entry, but didn’t get to do internal inspections for. Make sure they are still interested and get them on our roster for 2013.

3. Begin a fair and transparent waiting list for farmers that would like to join the group and become certified organic.

4. Hold a general meeting of our farmer-partners to encourage greater autonomy and self-assessment within the program. This should become an at least annual event.

5. Have at least 9 compost piles (one in each village) being actively and successfully managed.

6. Have at least 9 fields (one in each village) featuring a significant cover crop.

7. Identify (or create) some market streams for organic inputs that are not easy or possible for farmers to obtain right now: top of the list are at least one organic fertilizer option (like blood/bone meal), botanical pesticides (like neem or derris root [thoughts on that anyone?]), and companion crop seeds.

8. Continue monthly training meetings and have an attendance rate of at least 50% of farmer-partners each month with each farmer-partner attending at least 50% of meetings in 2013 (Does that sound like a really low bar to anyone else? Maybe we’ll revise that up around May or June).

9. Begin training a replacement for myself from 4-months before my scheduled departure. This will take a few intermediate steps like: find a field of suitable applicants to take on the job of ‘Director of Organic Certification’ (awesome title, right?) and hiring an assistant from that pool.

Plucking (aka harvesting)

As of now, mid-November, the harvest of Arabica coffee is happening everywhere coffee is grown in Oku. Since Oku is not uniform geographically or climatically, there are villages down in the valleys where the berries get ripe earlier (Mbam or Ngham, for example) and up high in the hills where red berries only show up a few weeks later (Emlah or Jiyane, say). Coffee is on just about everyone’s mind, either because they have their own coffee to harvest and process or they want to try to buy some coffee now while the price is low and make a little profit in a few weeks when the price inflates a bit.

I’ve spent a few mornings with people plucking a few baskets of cherries. As with most things, I’m slow. Not as slow as when I was picking the specialty beans at the mill back in May, but pretty slow. But it’s nice to have someone else in the field with you when you’re doing work like this, so I’m sure no one minds. At least I’m good at not dropping the berries, which would probably annoy people.

This may all be cryptic to anyone who hasn’t been close to coffee trees, so let’s back up. Arabica coffee is harvested a few times over the course of a season, because the cherries do not ripen all at the same time. Harvesters select only the ripened berries (or pretty close to ripened berries) and leave the green berries on the stem to continue maturing. This is a little tricky because coffee berries grow in clusters and are attached to the tree by a little forked stem (the peduncle) so when you try to pluck a single ripe berry it is easy to detach at least one or two unripe ones you didn’t mean to. Then they drop on the ground and its a pain to bend over to retrieve them and sometimes a pain to find them in the grass. This is why farmers here see clearing the weeds from the field as a necessary prerequisite to starting the harvest season.

I know that in other parts of the world, harvesters will go out to the field with matts or skirts to place under the trees during harvest to catch these wayward fruits, but here (I’ll say this with nothing to back me up) each tree yields so little and you move through the field so quickly that the time needed to lay down a skirt and constantly move it wouldn’t be reasonable. On the other hand, if you read up on Coffee Berry Disease (the scourge of the crop here) removing diseased berries from the field is recommended pretty much unanimously and using a skirt during harvesting can make that a lot easier.

When you do get the berries you want in your hand, you drop them in your basket or sac and move on to the next ones. If you ask someone around here how much coffee they harvested today, they’ll answer you with some number of ‘tins’, by which they mean 20-liter buckets. Later these same tins become the basic unit of measure for how much parchment coffee a person has to sell. When we are talking about well dried parchment, a tin can be estimated as about 9kgs and about seven tins will fill one sac. Meanwhile, two tins of berries eventually become about one tin of dry parchment (after you remove the cherry and dry the bean).