Tali Trigg
14 July 2005
interview
Washington, DC — Promotion of "fair trade" has become an increasingly important strategy of the campaign to alleviate global poverty. While consumers in developed countries have become more aware of producer realities, enterprises in developing countries are rewriting old rules of business, fusing growing world demand for coffee with the quest for a livable wage.
David Robinson is the co-founder and a member of the Mshikamano Farmers Group, an independent coffee-growing cooperative in Bara Village, Tanzania. The group has been growing coffee since 1995 and has nearly doubled the income farmers receive when selling their coffee. David Robinson is also the son of pioneering baseball legend Jackie Robinson, who was the first African-American to break the color barrier in major league baseball.
AllAfrica's Tali Trigg spoke with David Robinson at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington, D.C., where his label, Sweet Unity Farms Gourmet Coffee, had its products and methods on display. Robinson outlined the challenges and promises of the cooperative model and the difficulties of exporting from Africa to America.
Tell us about your road from America to Tanzania?
I was fortunate enough to go to Tanzania in 1967 in the company of my mother [and] traveled to Tanzania, Kenya, Ethiopia and Ghana. I saw Africa at a young age and was impressed with the beauty and also the wealth of the culture. I went back at nineteen as an independent traveler and went through ten African countries. Tanzania was tremendously politically progressive under the presidency of Julius Nyerere. A beautiful country, wealthy in natural resources, on the Indian Ocean, and [it] offered a person the potential to start up and engage in endeavors with a reasonable economic start-up. Tanzania was my country of choice, and I was fortunate in 1984 to begin to reside there permanently.
Coffee is the second most valuable commodity in the world after oil. What is your take on the current world coffee market, and where does Tanzania - and Bara Village - fit into it?
Everyone in Bara Village is a coffee farmer - second- and third-generation coffee farmers. We have created no wealth for our village as participants in the trade, only as laborers and selling from a village basis as opposed to participating in the chain. Coffee is a multi-billion dollar industry, but unless farmers begin to participate in that marketing chain, we will always remain poor. That is what Mshikamano Farmers Group is about.
We are a cooperative, started 10 years ago with 47 members. We are over 300 members today. Our focus is to engage ourselves in the business of selling our product as direct marketers to American roasters and importers and hence generate enough funds for development of our community.
This is July now; it is the selling season in Tanzania. Right now, individual farmers, non-cooperative members are selling for between 27 cents and 31 cents per pound. Our cooperative will be able to deliver between 53-55 cents per pound. As finished product, we sell an additional 15 cents per pound. So we're doubling what a farmer can get.
Now farmers are selling to the multi-nationals and domestic traders based on a need for cash. Those buyers come in and make immediate cash payments. The cooperative pays thirty, sixty, even ninety days later, so we have to plan our economies and that is extremely difficult for someone who only has one cash crop a year. We tell our members that if you have to sell coffee, sell your lower grade coffee to the multi-nationals and hold your best coffee for the cooperative and that's what everybody does - sometimes, in some years. I myself have sold a small portion - five to 10 percent - of our crop to deal with cash needs.
For those unfamiliar with cooperatives, what is unique about the methods of production and its relation to the environment?
A coop is a voluntary association generally [made up] of neighbors coming together in some form of economic and social activity. In our case, we are all coffee farmers. We all own our land and our farms. Our average member has three acres of coffee, four acres in a food crop. [We] come together at a processing stage and a marketing stage to function as an economic unit, where there is an equal distribution of proceeds for all members.
Coops offer an opportunity for farmers to create an organizational and quantitative product, but once you're organized and functioning as an organization, you can begin to deal with other social issues in the community. For example, we have a solar energy project now. We are distributing solar panels to our members. The larger panels can be purchased on credit. It's a natural spin-off. We are not on the electrical grid, and solar energy is a wonderful way to allow a quality-of-life improvement at a cost a farmer can choose, anywhere from a five-watt system to a 50-watt system.
Fair trade is a wonderful movement that we credit with raising social consciousness of consumers across the world in terms of some of the inequities in agricultural trade and production. We support the concept, and we function much in the same philosophical mode.
We are not members or certified as fair trade. We are certified as direct trade by the Tanzanian Coffee Board. When it comes to the mechanics of actually functioning in the coffee marketplace, fair trade requires that sales be done at a $1.26 per pound level, and an additional payment paid by the roaster or importer of green beans to the fair trade organization. We found that to be too restrictive in terms of market realities. We had three and a half years from 2000-2004 when the price of coffee was below 80 cents a pound, and in market realities such as that, importers and roasters will buy a tiny token of coffee as fair trade to say, yes we have it, but 99 percent of their coffee will be bought based on market realities.
So as a direct trade organization we have the same philosophy and actual equal distribution of funds to our membership. We have a democratically elected 13-member executive committee, but we also have the flexibility of not being bound into a price structure, and we're able to negotiate with market realities in mind and therefore sell the totality of our coffee crop at the very best price possible.
Coffee likes shade, birds like shade, the soil likes shade. So we are to a very large extent, all shade grown. Normally you will clear a farm of trees because some species of trees are not viable to grow with coffee - they will suck up nutrients or moisture from the soil. There is a special grade of tree that grows rapidly, that has a broad canopy [which is why] we plant those, and that becomes shading for the coffee bean. It helps to retain moisture in the soil and also becomes habitat for birds and other wildlife. The leaves themselves, when they drop, assist in returning nitrogen to the soils.
In the last five years, fair trade, especially in coffee, has been getting a lot of attention. What do you mean by the "philosophy" of fair trade, which your cooperative follows? Also, you've called fair trade and direct trade the "second vote of consumers." Why are consumers important, and how do Tanzanian farmers relate to them?
As the group of producers on the losing end of the traditional trade system, African producers (and Africa in general) have always been advocates of fair trade. Julius Nyerere, former President of Tanzania, used to talk about the fact that when we buy tractors from the west, the price is determined by the west. When we sell coffee to the west, the price is also determined by the west. The inequity of voice in being able to determine the economic wealth of either your imports or your exports - that's something Africans have always been aware of.
The movement really started, I believe, in Holland and over the last 10 years has taken an international focus. They have done a tremendous job of raising consumer awareness. The cooperative movement, whether direct trade or fair trade, will not be able to survive without consumer involvement. Stores are very susceptible to consumer requests, but they are also very comfortable with the existing system. The existing system generates a great deal of money for the corporate intermediary - not the producer - and that corporate intermediary is able to be a sponsor and to make large contributions in the supermarket industry. It's very difficult for the small [producer] to get on the shelf, because supermarket space is like real estate - the big players can pay the big rents.
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