International

Alright, so I was supposed to write this a month ago but if I have a single incredible talent, it has to be for procrastination. Today though, I am stuck in Huehuetenango with nothing to do. I could watch TV all day or read a book, but I have decided instead to do the things I have needed to do for a while.

Lets start with a little context. I’m here on an internship with the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Ottawa, a cool little programme that allows us to get out of the classroom for a semester and out into the world, to learn practically about what we are supposed to be studying. My job is through Uniterra, a volunteer programme the mostly sends professionals for longer term placements in a host of developing countries. Uniterra is a partnership between the World University Service of Canada and le Centre d’études en coopération internationale and it is funded by the Canadian International Development Agency.

I am working here with a project that is sort of an alliance between international NGOs, government ministries and producer organisations called the interinstitutional commission for Fair and Solidarity Trade. My initial job description was that I would be assessing the situation of the commmission and then creating a tool to help comission members to use results-based management, something I know little or nothing about. Luckily, sort of, the job was pretty immediately changed once I stated to work with the commission. I am carrying out two research projects, one to meet with the commission’s coordinators to establish the plan for activities in 2010, the other to establish what members believe Fair Trade and Solidarity Trade actually mean. Both of these activities should have been carried out before in my opinion, and certainly the project to define Fair Trade and Solidarity Trade since the commissino just had a university prof on a contract to develop their strategic plan with resources that we don’t have now, and which has a section discussing the two terms but that fails to define them. Defining them is important because if we don’t decide what they mean that how is the commission supposed to promote them, what is the point of the commission in that case. It’s fundamental.

In any case the two projects left me spending the first month and a half developing the questionnaires and planning out the projects, but also trying to learn as much as I could about the industries that are involved, primarily coffee, honey and handicrafts in the case of Fair Trade, and yet to be defined for Solidarity trade. Working with the Maritime Fishermen’s Union (my summer job) was a good prelude for this, these industries are super complicated, often they have a lot of capital and often negative incomes, Fishermen in the Atlantic often live off of Employment Insurance because they aren’t paid enough for their catch. Coffee farmers and their families in Guatemala often live off less than a dollar a day each. Fair Trade hardly makes the situation much better, perhaps they live off of $1.30 or $1.40 daily with the certified fair trade price. The reasons for this are complicated, the two main factors are consumer choice and power relations. The big coffee companies, Nestlé and others, control most of the market. In the production of coffee there is a great deal of processing that is done in Guatemala by the farmers, various stages of sorting and drying. The value-added comes in roasting the coffee because they big companies control the roasting, but not because the toasting is a particularly complicated valued adding activity, it is actually one of the cheapest and most inexpensive steps. However the big companies control roasting and control the market so they set the price. In the past they have pushed governments for instance to set very heavy taxes on imports of roasted coffee so that coffee can not be roasted in the producer countries. They also blend coffees from various different countries to create the flavours consumers want with consumer info that is not available to organisations in developing countries. Thus the coffee produced in Guatemala, Brasil, Vietnam, Columbia and Ethiopia produces far more money in Northern countries than it does in the producer countries. Think of your $3 cup of coffee at starbucks, the producer probably only received a few cents of that price. Producers are paid in fair trade $1.25 per pound, roughly, while you pay $6 per pound in Canada to buy it fresh. The major coffee companies insist on making significant profits, up to 80% while the coffee farmer and their family live on $1 a day. You learn a lot about the world when you work with coffee and Fair Trade, whenever a company makes super profits it’s not a fair market, those profits are made either on the backs of poor producers or at the expense of future generations in the case of Oil and Gas, in economics you only make marginal returns in a free market, it’s not a free market.

The other major problem is that consumers seem to feel a cup of coffee should cost pennies. Even if a specialty coffee cost $15 a pound each cup is less than $1, where as a cup of expensive wine can cost an astronomically high amount of money. I thought about this in terms of the people who drink 6 cups a day and how prohibitive it would be if coffee cost more, but then again people smoke packs of cigarettes each day and don’t seem to find the price prohibitive. We need to accept that coffee should cost more than nothing if we really value the lives of the producers. Even fair trade does not do this, the fair trade price has often been belong the market price whil fair trade does not favour the farmer so much as the buyer in reality by giving them a good image without significantly increasing their income.

Coffee is the biggest product, the second biggest legal export from the developing world after oil (legal, because illicit drug exports are incredibly valuable). The other two products are different, but in the case of handicrafts the market is totally depressed by cheap textiles from China. Guatemala’s products are incredibly beautiful and are great quality, but they are a tonne of work for very little money. At least they help women, but they don’t provide a livelihood.

Anyway, I’m going to get back onto the story. My job is letting me travel around the country to do interviews and I am meeting people from aid organisations, producer organisations and government. It’s an incredible opportunity to learn about the country and it’s challenges. Things like the terms of trade and climate change are palpable in my work, they have very practicle impacts on the lives of people here in Guatemala. I have gotten to visit Huehuetenango in the Northwest (today), Cobán in Alta Verapaz passing through cloud forests where there are still quetzales, the national bird) and I am going to be in Quetzaltenango, the second biggest city in Guatemala, on Friday. Each place presents an opportunity for an interview on the incredible issues raised by the ideas of fair trade and solidarity trade. I think I have learned the most on this trip of any trip I have made so far.

I also got to visit a major CIDA funded development project in Lago Atitlan with the head of CIDA operations for the country, a fantastic opportunity. We visited coffee farmers and vegetable farmers who were being taught and provided a Canadian technology for collecting water that will allow them to have 11 harvests per year instead of three (gives you a sense of how incredibly fertile the country is). Lago Atitlan is spectacular, it has four volcanoes. Sadly though it seems to be dying. Run off from fertilizers and sewage has produced a bloom of Cyanobacteria that emit a toxin when they die, but the bloom is actually also a major consequence of Climate Change, the temperature of the lake has increased by 5 degrees and at the old temperature there would not have been a bacterial bloom despite the increased nutrients in the water.

Guatemala has taught me the most of any country I have been in in Latin America I think, but also because it is the most poor, the most unjust and the most violent. There are numerous murders per day and the country has among the worst distribution of wealth in the world. Half the children are malnourished and many have died this year because of a drought in the normally wet winter (Another consequence of climate change, the 3rd or 4th El Niño year in the past decade?). The rich live in guarded colonias (literally: colonies) and often drive in bullet-proof cars or fly in helicopters (Guatemala has the most helicopters per capita in the world).

I am living in the capital. A dirty busy city and one of the most dangerous. The worst part of being here has been that the sun goes down at 5:30 or 6:00 and it’s too dangerous to walk around in the capital afterwards. The people are very nice though and I generally prefer Guatemala over Peru for example, I don’t get the impression that everyone wants to emigrate, which I found so sad in Peru, even though probably more Guatemalans do emigrate. I am living in a wealthier zone about 25 minutes walk from work, sharing a pretty nice apartment with another Canadian volunteer who is here for a year. There are two Venezuelan-Canadian volunteers two floors down who are very very nice and we spend a fair bit of time with.

I have been travelling a bit too, this has to be one of the most beautiful countries in the world, it has incredible ruins, jungles, volcanoes, rivers. It’s incredible. I think my favourite place so far is split between Lago Atitlán and the Carribbean coast from Río Dulce down the river to Lívingston. In Lívingston they speak a creole of English as well as Spanish, they are decendents of freed African slaves from the Carribbean.

I’ve had plenty of strange interactions too, from being hit on not so subtley by a gay guy in Cobán (Imagine how difficult it must be to be gay in rural Guatemala considering how homophobic and violent the country is) to being offered señoritas (read prostitutes) by a taxi driver in Guate (sometimes foreigners come to Guatemala, alone…). The taxi driver was an amazing case, I think afterwards he tried to prove to me he was actually a good person despite his side business. He told me about how he had fought as an anti-guerrilla soldier during the 1980s at the height of the “anti-guerilla” genocide of aborginal peoples (200000 were killed, 85% indigenous, 95% by government forces). He told me he had been shot in the side, that he had been forced to eat raw dead dog in his training. Also he participated in two coup d’états and took over a TV station in one of them, the first coup put Rios Montt in power, the second took him out of power. If being a pimp was bad, what he did during the war was probably worse. Before you judge though, he told me how he grow up as a kid in the large’farms agricultural area of Retalhuleu, his parents worked on the farms. He didn’t have his first pair of shoes until he was 13 and it was not even his parents who bought them for him, it was his brother. Before when he got spines in his feet they would cut them out with a knife. I’m not in a position to judge such a person, though I will tell him if I see him again that I don’t approve of his business, I should have told him then directly, I think I was a little shocked.

Well, there you go. I don’t have much else to write in this, except to say that it looks as though Dima and I will be back to Guatemala in May June, coordinating a group with Operation Groundswell. We both have a lot of contacts in the cuntry, but we are going to try to make it as strong an educational experience as possible. We’re going to work in Atitlán, seeing the consequences of climate change first hand and immersing ourselves in an indigenous community. We’re going to visit a community that is fighting against Canadian mining interests. We’re going to learn about what it’s like to be a farmer in Guatemala and how the international trading system works and we’ll learn about the country’s history. We’ll even climb some volcanoes and try to see a whole lot of the country. Perhaps most importantly everyone will learn about themselves though. If your interested check out the Operation Groundswell website: Operationgroundswell.com

Thanks for reading! Hope you found it interesting!

Jonathan

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