i Patrick W. Staib Anthropology This dissertation is approved, and it ...

coffee. 79 This project required significant organization between the Ministry of Education
and the two El Naranjo cooperatives: José Damas and Guillermo Hernánadez.
UCPCO
When Kelly and I lived in Zona Uno, our neighbor Eddy Garcia was a member of the
UCPCO cooperative. He parked his older-model Land Cruiser off of the street next to our
house on the driveway our landlady had built. Eddy and his wife had two small children,
and they operated a small venta (store) in the front of their house, across the street from
ours. On the afternoon of May 8, long after the harvest and export had been completed, I
asked Eddy if his cooperative had paid their farmers for last season’s export. He had
mentioned that it was taking a long time to get paid for his harvest. He was worrying
about having to go deeper into debt with local merchants.
Eddy explained,
Si, nos fue mal. El rendimiento fue bajo. Solo el 46% nos dieron. Esto no sirve.
Producir orgánico casi no rinde del todo y te van a venir con un bajo rendimiento
exportable. La UCPCO pagó mal este año y a lo mejor me salgo. (Yes, poorly.
Our yield was low. They declared only 46% was exportable. This is bad. Organic
doesn’t yield at all, and then you get stuck with a low exportable yield. The
UCPCO paid poorly this year and I better get out).
Not all of the coffee a farmer harvests is exportable quality. When I relayed the
above statement to Danilo he explained that most specialty farmers are able to export
about half of what they turn over to the cooperative. This is a very interesting aspect of
what it means to share in the gains and losses of a community-based cooperative
endeavor. After harvest and depulping, farmers dry their coffee to about 47% humidity.
79 FLO stipulates that US$5.00 from every quintal sold under Fair Trade certification is to
be reinvested into the community. In the past, the general assembly has voted to
redistribute the funds to member farmers.
214