| |
|
Published in Spring 2001
|
The Oriole, the Coyote and the Cup of Coffee
|
| |
David McLauchlin’s notes for a noon-time address to members of the Royal Montreal Curling Club, 14 February 2001.
|
| |
|
By David McLauchlin
|
| |
|
|
I have a special place I visit in the dead of winter. I can go there in my mind's eye without even leaving the city: a valley running north from Lac Megantic, past Victoriaville. The Nicolet river, running along that valley, has been flowing clean for about 15 years, where the farmers have stopped letting their cattle come to drink and mess up the river. It is a river that has been stocked with speckled trout, where fly fishing only is allowed. One gets there by descending the winding road from the white house with a red roof, down almost to the bridge, where the river is held in shade by the steep sides of the valley and the thick forest along the banks of the river, and the sun doesn't rise until about 9:00 on a summer day.
In the place where I pull off the road to park, the alder and sumac are thick among the tall poplar trees, and every summer for the last three years, there's been a little orange bird, an oriole, to greet me. Some call it a Baltimore Oriole, others a Northern Oriole. He's usually quiet that early in the morning. He flits quickly through the bushes, hardly allowing himself to be seen. It's 6:00 in the morning.
I see him as I pull on my waders and string up my rod, and set off through the dewy weeds, across a field and over a fence. A redwing blackbird swoops overhead, warning me away from his nesting grove.
That early in the morning I like to have a thermos of coffee with me as I sit in the shaded valley. The water in the river is alive with insects that have hatched during the night. Trout rise to slurp them from the surface film. Those that escape the fish climb on a reed or a rock, dry their wings, then fly off across the water. Large-winged mayflies may land awkwardly on the surface, then resume their flight. A trout is sometimes watching from below, ready to jump through the film and grab them. I place my small trout fly among the rising hatch, or among the flies awkwardly landing on the surface. I imitate nature, and the trout is tricked. The coffee tastes good. Soon the creel holds two or three speckled trout. The sun is now up. The weeds are dry. By the parking lot, the oriole is singing in the bushes; a nest shaped like the pocket of a pool table hangs in the leaves.
Love for this special valley and my vivid memories of this place keep me warm in the winter.
But out by Nôtre Dame-de-Ham right now it's winter. The river is frozen and there are deer tracks along the snowy pathways to the few spots where the rapids show open water through the ice. The oriole isn't there. It's gone south, likely to Mexico, for the winter. I wonder if it will be back in a few months, when I go back to fish.
In the dead of winter when I'm drinking my morning coffee and I can look out the back window at the bird feeder, I close my eyes and see the valley, the shadows by the river, and the tiny orange and black oriole.
Let me tell you now about another valley. This one is in Mexico, down where Mexico narrows and forms a series of mountainous folds running south into Guatemala, in the southern Mexican states of Chiapas and Oaxaca. Those mountains are ribboned with narrow gravel roads that wind in switchbacks up one side of the mountains, over the top, then down the other. Trees grow right up to the mountaintops. Most of the lower valley is open, where forest companies have come and logged the timber for the big landowners. But in the higher altitudes, where logging is impractical, the trees grow. That's where the campesinos live. They call these forests ancestral land. Geographers call it cloudforest.
The polite translation for campesino is 'field worker.' Or peasant. They may live high up in the cloudforests but they're on the bottom rung of the political and class ladder in Mexico. They have no trucks or cars. Their means of transportation is a cart pulled by a mule or an old bony horse. Or they walk to the next village or down from the forest carrying bundles of sticks or bags of green coffee beans. If they had a car or money for the rusted old bus that sometimes comes through here, it would take 8 to 10 hours to drive to the state capitol of Oaxaca. It's a four-day drive to Mexico City. Only a handful of people from these mountain villages have ever been to either place.
Pull into this village with me.
A rooster crows. Chickens are pecking in the dust. There is a collection of tin-rooved houses, a school made of logs with a corrugated roof. A stream supplies the town with drinking water, filling cisterns as it tumbles down the mountainside. The village is called San José de Saragosa.
The people here work plots of land for table vegetables. They have a few goats. Their only cash comes from coffee that they grow in amongst the other trees of the forest.
 |
| Photo: Charles Dickson |
| Dave McLauchlin interviews María Pérez López in San José de Saragosa, Mexico. | You'll meet María Pérez López, a small woman with dark brown skin and high cheekbones, who keeps her long grey hair in a single tight braid.
She offers to take us to where the coffee grows. We follow María up a steep road, past the filthy water trickling along a ditch that flows from the latrines by the sides of the houses.
We leave the road and begin to climb a path. Dry leaves crunch underfoot. Overhead a canopy of branches from the towering hardwoods and intermediate pines shade the shorter trees-orange, lime and lemon trees-and smaller bushes of many different varieties. Some are in flower. Some support vines.
And here and there, scattered throughout the forest, coffee grows on the spindly branches of what look like thin lilac bushes. It hangs in clusters, like cherries.
The people bend the coffee branches carefully and examine the cherries. They won't be ready for a month yet.
Now María and her neighbors begin to talk about a regular visitor who will come to the village sometime in the next few days. They describe him as a big animal, a sneaky, untrustworthy, unscrupulous animal: 'el coyote.' The coyote. It's about time for the visit from the coyote.
About a month before the coffee harvest, just about when all the money from last year's harvest has been spent, a couple of men drive into the village in a pick-up truck.
They have a strongbox with them, and rifles. The big guy offers to lend people money. Most people say yes, but reluctantly. The campesinos need some money right now; they can't wait until the coffee harvest. They need a new tool for the garden, or a pair of shoes for the daughter who's getting married later in the summer. The loan is secured by signing over the coffee crop that will be picked in a few weeks, hulled in the local hulling mill, and sewn into cloth bags.
The coyote pays some money now, then comes back for the harvest. He never pays the amount he promised. He promises $10.00 a bag for the coffee...that's a hundred-pound bag. When he pays up, it's more like $6.00 to $7.00 a bag.
María says:
"Those men, the coyotes, don't care. It doesn't matter to them if we have food to eat or not. Their thing is to sweep all we have and keep it for themselves, as debt payment. It's good profit...for them. Every year, they come out and buy our coffee. But they don't support us. They rip us off, we owe money, and we don't have any money to spend...."
They wonder how to make more money-how to grow more coffee. Some people have heard that there is a kind of coffee that grows ten times thicker in the sun than the coffee in the shade. They want to cut down the forest so they can plant the kind of coffee that grows in the sun. It's plantation coffee. And it has taken over the production in countries like Colombia, Venezuela and Guatemala.
In the last 20 years, more than a million hectares of Latin American forest were cut down or burned down so people could cultivate 'sun' coffee. But the indigenous people in the cloudforests of Mexico are making the effort to grow coffee the old-fashioned way, and in doing so, they're saving the trees and the forest life that goes with them.
María explains how she and her family take care of this part of the forest. She shows how they chop back competing undergrowth and prune the coffee bushes to increase the fruiting branches. As she says, it's labor intensive and she doesn't use chemicals and pesticides, but this way they can keep the smallholdings of forest they have. If they let the big landholder cut it down, they'd have no place to live: they'd have to move into the city, or up along the border with the United States. And then their family would disappear.
She says: "There's a lot of investment in time: cleaning, harvesting, de-pulping, washing and drying. You don't earn money during the growing season. It's a lot of work transforming coffee from the cherry and getting it into the bags."
Here's a small economic fact: from 1988 to 1994 the world price of coffee dropped. That's because in 1987 the International Coffee Agreement collapsed. It functioned like the Canadian Wheat Board, but for green coffee beans. There was supply management, quotas, and so on. With no more supply management, the market was flooded with coffee. The price dropped.
That low price put pressure on coffee producers, forcing development of coffee plantations with higher yields per acre. It stimulated a vast change to full sun-grown coffee.
So Mexico is the last country in Latin America to not chop down its forests for coffee. Coffee from Mexico is still mostly shade grown. But in the areas where open, sun-grown coffee plantations were established, birdlife fell right off. The migratory birds that fly through the forests had no way to sustain themselves on their migrations.
Between 1988 and now, half the population of Northern Orioles in North America has disappeared.
So it makes me want to listen, as I'm standing in the cloudforest discussing the coyote and the method of selling coffee, I listen for the familiar sound of the oriole that lives by the Nicolet river. The little orange bird I have enjoyed when I go fishing.
I have found a way of buying coffee from the campesinos of Mexico and Guatemala, who live in the forests, who haven't switched to sun-grown coffee.
I'd like to help them maintain a livelihood by which they can keep living in the shade of the cloud forest, and grow their trees, and their coffee. Because 98% of the coffee on the market in Canada is plantation coffee, grown in full sunlight. Only 2% is grown in the shade. And that shade is critical to the oriole I've come to depend on to get me through the coldest days of winter.
By the way, are you enjoying the coffee you're drinking? It's shade-grown, fair-trade coffee from Mexico. I bought it at a café here that stocks it. Enjoy.
The Royal Montreal Curling Club is located in downtown Montreal. Founded in 1807 by officers of the Scots garrison and prominent members of the business community, the RMCC prides itself as North America's oldest private sports club.
The coffee referred to by the author was certified by the Montreal-based, not-for-profit organization, Équiterre http://www.equiterre.qc.ca/english/coffee/index.html>, which buys coffee directly from a producer co-op in southern Oaxaca. Through its "A Just Coffee" campaign, Équiterre promotes fair trade to support the efforts of families trying to improve their lives, while also caring for the environment. Its staff works to encourage business owners to make fair trade coffee more accessible. Équiterre has received support from NAFEC, the fund administered by CEC to provide small grants to community-based environmental projects across the continent.
|
Top
