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James Robert "Jimbob" Onguko
Portrait of a farmer

In the 1960’s, James’s father first planted some 400 coffee trees of the Scottish Mission variety on his one acre plot in the mist shrouded hills south of Mount Kenya. After his father’s passing, the main plot was sub-divided into three equal size farms for James, his two brothers and their families. The ground is fertile and the rains, which come twice a year, are normally just at the right time to provide essential water for the trees.
Today James has 130 trees which yield about 300kg of coffee cherry per year.

Jimbob, as he was called as a child, and it has stuck throughout his life, was born in 1959, just as his father was first preparing the ground for his new coffee trees. During his primary school days, Jimbob would also learn about spraying, fertilising, pruning and how to produce a maximum crop of quality coffee. Jimbob grew up during the coffee-boom in the mid 1970's. He learned to respect and admire the coffee tree because, quite simply, it paid for everything.

This enduring relationship stays with him to this day. In a way, sentimental value keeps coffee rooted in these communities high up around Mount Kenya and the Aberdares. “Coffee equals love for my family and future for my children” James says and that pretty much says it all.

On a typical chilly dawn, smoke gently wisps out of a small hut across from the main Onguko family dwelling, where Jimbob’s wife, Anne, can be found stirring the morning chai (tea) and preparing a pot of steamy corn meal. Their daughters, Rose and Purity, huddle around the fire to clear off the last of the nights chill, while Jimbob and his two sons, Anthony and Edward, work through the morning detail of milking their one cow, sharpening and preparing the implements needed for the day and cut napier grass.

In addition to coffee, Jimbob grows beans, cabbage, maize and tends three banana trees. Enough to sustain the family. Jimbob has two chickens and a rooster in a makeshift pen in their compound. The main dwelling consists of a family room, sleeping quarters and the kitchen hut. There is no electricity and water is from a well, dug by Jimbob’s father.

After breakfast, which is the same every day, Edward, Rose and Purity go off to the local school and Jimbob with eldest son Anthony walk the few yards from the compound to their steep sloping acre of trees, laid out in military fashion straight lines. Day in and day out this routine continues.

This is the life that makes the smallholder coffee farmer, whose main concern is caring for his crop that provides everything for him and his family. Well-loved coffee trees and a small but vibrant garden have kept the family healthy and educate his children. The quality coffee around the world does not exist without thousands of people like Jimbob and his family. The time and attention he devotes to each individual tree coupled with the ideal soils, rainfall and sun, will almost always produce the best coffee in the world.

According to James, the secret, if there is one, to growing good coffee is in the manure. Letting it sit under the shade of the tree until a bit of organic material sprouts through, means it is ready to provide the tree with its nutrients. Next most important is the pruning and this has to be done just after the bright red cherries are picked. Doing this early means that new sprouts are in place and the tree has healed itself before the rains come.

Jimbob belongs to a co-operative and each harvest he takes his 300kg of bright red cherries to the central coffee market. He remembers during the mid to late 1970’s how happy the family were at the price they received from the traders, but then in the 80’s the price would drop each year, yet the cost to his father to produce the coffee and buy life’s essentials would go up. Jimbob is sure that the worry of this caused the stress resulting in his fathers massive heart attack and untimely death.

In the early 1990’s the co-operative was approached by a fairtrade group and after some wrangling and a lot of explanation the co-operative agreed to let these muzungu’s (white people with money) buy the coffee crop. The results to start with were definitely an improvement on before. They received a better price for the crop and that was all that was important. Jimbob’s life became better, not easier, just better.

In the latter part of the 1990’s he noticed, as did the rest of the co-operative, that the price was creeping downwards again and the buyers were becoming more and more “picky” (his word) about everything to do with the sale of the coffee cherry. He saw similarities with the end of the 1970’s boom times and was concerned. He didn’t want to end up like his father, sick with worry.

They had heard about this group involved in “New Generation fair trade” and although completely in the dark about what they did he managed to get the co-operative committee to agree to arrange a meeting with them. Now to you and me arranging a meeting is simple. We look up their phone number and give them a call. Not quite so easy on the slopes of Mount Kenya. There is a phone in the main town, but that is a day and a half walk away and there is no “yellow pages” sitting by it. Their route to arranging a meeting was to agree at a co-operative meeting to all put 5 bob (about 0.037 pence) each, into a kitty and one committee member was chosen to travel to Nairobi, by matatu (local cheap 14 seater bus), stay overnight with a relative of another co-operative member and walk to the offices of this new group.
In all, it took five days for the committee member to make the trip, spend an hour at the Nairobi office and explain their problem and return home.
However, mission accomplished, the meeting took place the following week.

At the meeting it was explained that the difference with “new generation fair trade” compared to “fairtrade” was to do with branding and getting away from pedantic and old fashioned philosophies about protectionism. You can imagine how well this was taken on board, it was like talking to wooden statues, completely over their heads, blank expressions to a man, not one word was understood and I blame myself entirely for that, as I was the one talking to them.

It was then that all became clear to me. There is no point me trying to explain how Fairtrade Labelling Organisations (FLO’s) vehemently protect their branding and logo’s and it takes years and myriads of hoops to be jumped through to obtain licence to use the fairtrade branding. That’s of no interest to Jimbob. All he wants to be sure about is that he gets a fair price for his coffee and if there is any help going he is not going to turn it down. So, after talking about 22% returned to the community and how that was split up, including a fair price for each kilogram supplied, social development, new tree planting, land acquisition, family support and development, in fact full application of the F.I.N.E. criteria, (just explained simply) Jimbob was happy again.

However the experience I received from this set me to thinking, and I leave you with these thoughts as well,

“While we in the West complicate and embroil ourselves in protecting the image of fairtrade, for arguably all the right motives, the pedantics actually make things more difficult for the producers in the south.

There is a fine line between survival and complete destruction for Jimbob and thousands like him around the world, give them a fair price and leave the politics at home.

True fair trade is about helping those less fortunate in any and all ways we can, but at the end of the day, a fair price is everything and we only achieve that fair price by selling to the western consumer, but that consumer demands value for money. New generation ideals provide fair trade products, of similar quality, FOR THE SAME PRICE as non-fair trade.

It’s a trust thing really, Jimbob trusts me to maintain him a fair price and I trust him to produce some of the finest coffee in the world”.

Thank you Jimbob, for teaching me this, I won’t let you down.

Andrew Hind
www.jambohut.com

©jambohut and Ethical Earth Limited 2006