In the late-1990s, Cochise County emerged as the nation’s
illegal-immigration hotspot. Border Patrol agents were catching
crossers by the busload, and humanitarian groups struggled to help a
flood of travelers lost in the desert.
To Douglas resident Tommy Bassett, it was sometimes overwhelming.
“We were busy putting Band-Aids on the situation,” says the former
industrial plant manager turned activist. But Bassett was also
pondering the deeper problem—namely, that Mexico seemed incapable
of creating jobs to keep its folks at home.
The Rev. Mark Adams, a gentle-mannered South Carolina native and
ordained Presbyterian minister, was thinking the same thing. That
wasn’t exactly a coincidence, since Adams and Bassett both worked under
the binational ministry Frontera de Cristo, where they encountered
hundreds of migrants, typically young men, coming from Southern Mexico,
where plummeting coffee and corn prices had devastated their remote
farming villages.
“At the time, the Border Patrol was deporting a thousand people a
day,” Bassett says. “… A lot of people were coming through, and a lot
of them were coffee guys. That’s when the coffee prices were down to 30
or 40 cents a pound.”
In his ministry, Adams was talking to a lot of people from Chiapas,
“and they were asking him, ‘How come we get 40 cents a pound for our
coffee, and you can buy one cup of coffee for $4 at Starbucks?'”
Bassett says.
One migrant they encountered, a man named Eduardo Verdugo, came from
the southern Mexico state of Chiapas. He’d been beaten while trying to
cross the desert, allegedly by a Border Patrol agent, and was then
deported. He met Adams in an Agua Prieta Presbyterian church.
“Eduardo said to Mark, ‘If only we could only sell our coffee for a
fair price,'” Bassett says, “‘because to leave our land is to suffer.’
He didn’t say it was really horrible almost dying of thirst in the
desert. He didn’t say it was really crappy to get beat up. He said, ‘To
leave our land is to suffer.'”
That got the wheels rolling. “We started looking at addressing the
root cause of migration,” says Bassett, “and not just the
symptoms.”
Soon after, Just Coffee—or Café Justo—was born.
The simple idea was to help farmers in at least one Chiapas village
make enough money so that they could stay on their land. Today, that
idea is a success story; the community of Salvador Urbina is thriving
rather than just surviving, and Just Coffee’s concept promises to
revolutionize the free-trade movement.
Since this project was first detailed in the Tucson Weekly (“Roasting Revolution,” Feb. 8, 2007), it has continued to grow. And
now, the remarkable story is retold in the recently released book
Just Coffee: Caffeine With a Conscience. Authored by Bassett and
Adams, it’s a moving, colorful and refreshingly optimistic primer on
how to solve the poverty that drives illegal immigration, one village
at a time. Proceeds from book sales are earmarked for expanding the
Just Coffee model to other countries.
Through their village cooperative—and the cooperative effort
with Just Coffee—some 50 Salvador Urbina families have complete
control over their product, from planting the crop to roasting the
beans just across the line from Douglas in Agua Prieta, Sonora.
That’s critical, since much of the profit in coffee is taken by
middlemen, hidden between receiving the green, raw beans and roasting
them for market.
By commandeering the coffee-to-market process, Just Coffee is able
to provide $1.33 per pound for the growers, rather than a measly 40
cents.
Meanwhile, Bassett and Adams had discovered the perfect vehicle for
positive change. “Coffee is a very weird substance,” Bassett says.
“It’s the second-most legally traded commodity in the world behind oil,
so it’s a big player on the world scene.
“The other really strange thing is that the average grower of coffee
only has three or four acres of land. With other commodities like rice
and beans and corn, the average grower has 20 acres. Coffee is also
very labor-intensive, so coffee-growers tend to be pretty small
stakeholders. And they tend to live in very rural areas—good
coffee grows 2,000 to 6,000 feet above sea level, and within 20 degrees
of the equator. That means (coffee-growing land) is on the sides of
mountains, mostly volcanoes. The land is so crappy … that’s the
reason they’re able to own it.”
For all of those reasons, Salvador Urbina’s growers had been stuck
at subsistence levels. And all of those hurdles vanished when they were
able to garner a fair price. “And so,” says Bassett, “it turns out that
to address poverty, you really can’t pick a better product than
coffee.”
Having a good idea was just the first challenge. The second was
convincing the residents of Salvador Urbina, high in the Chiapas hills,
that the two white guys showing up from the United States were
legitimate. It didn’t help that a nearby village had been ripped off by
other Americans offering to “help.”
But Bassett and Adams boasted a connection to Salvador Urbina in
native son Daniel Cifuentes, who’d traveled to Agua Prieta for work
after coffee prices dropped. Cifuentes helped convince the coffee
growers to join forces, and in March 2002, Just Coffee applied for a
$20,000 loan from the Frontera de Cristo Micro-Credit Ministry. That
money bought the roaster now in Agua Prieta. And by the following June,
the first Salvador Urbina coffee arrived by bus, ready for
roasting.
Then Bassett, Adams and their team began distributing Just Coffee
through area churches and some retail outlets. Annual sales now top
$360,000, and provide Salvador Urbina residents with pensions and
health care. The book is filled of photographs of a village finally
enjoying a taste of relative prosperity.
The program is also expanding to other Mexican villages, and to
impoverished coffee growers in Haiti.
At the same time, Just Coffee has taken a small but profound step
toward easing immigration tensions in the United States. “It always
seemed reasonable to use the coffee-cooperative idea to address
migration,” Bassett says. “And, in fact, over 70 people from Salvador
Urbina who were working in the U.S. in a nonofficial status have
returned home. The community has grown—the schools are actually
too small now, because the kids don’t have to work in the coffee fields
anymore. They can go to class instead. They have clean water to drink,
and they get to stay in their village.”
In other words, they no longer suffer by leaving their land.
This article appears in Apr 16-22, 2009.
