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News archive
Spring, 2006
Market Expands
Into Old Schoolhouse Bookstore
Market’s GM Visits Coffee
Co-ops in Mexico
Special Thanks
Market Expands
Into Old Schoolhouse Bookstore
After much planning, work, and enthusiasm,
the South Royalton Market expanded into the Old Schoolhouse
Bookstore at the end of 2005. Volunteers contributed many
hours behind the scenes at meetings and planning sessions
to make sure that the expansion would go smoothly.
The Board would like to thank in particular:
David Brandau, Randy Leavitt, and Peter Gutschow for overseeing
the work; Steve Judge and his crew for doing the actual construction;
the volunteers who helped move coolers, shelves, and products
from one “side” to another during the Christmas
break; Tom Powers for continuing to be a flexible and supportive
landlord; Anita Abbot for first coming up with the idea to
share her space with the Market; and, of course, Peg Grote
and the entire South Royalton Market staff for being the best
staff a cooperative could hope to have. We couldn’t
have done it without you!
Market’s GM Visits
Coffee Co-ops in Mexico
Peggy Grote won’t forget January 12.
It was a Thursday, hot, sunny and cloudless,
at least 80 degrees, the day she and seven fellow managers
and buyers from U.S. food cooperatives walked – climbed
is more like it — up a mountain in southern Mexico to
see and experience coffee farming first hand. “I think
I never felt so out of breath in my life,” she said.
She and the others were being introduced to members of rural
farm cooperatives whose coffee and other products are sold
in the South Royalton Co-op and similar markets, and also
to the realities of life in the Third World. In such countries
indigenous rural workers try to compete with international
agribusiness giants that dominate the marketplace, and it’s
frequently a losing battle, she learned.
Her hosts fed her and her friends as if they
were visiting royalty, held dances and played music almost
endlessly, she said, rolling her eyes in wonder. “We
were exhausted.”
Sponsor of the week-long trip to Mexico was
Equal Exchange, the Massachusetts-based marketing cooperative
that supplies coffee, tea, cocoa and chocolate to South Royalton’s
and similar co-op markets in New England and across the United
States. Equal Exchange is a growing business in its own right;
it has expanded sales every year since its 1986 founding,
and by 26 percent in each of the past two years, says spokesman
Rodney North.
Its mission, says Grote, is to support Third-World
small-farm cooperatives through the practice of fair trading,
which includes payment of guaranteed minimum ‘fair’
prices and access to previously off-limits credit for investment
in land, education and improved social services. Equal Exchange’s
informational brochure says it works with more than 30 coffee,
tea, cocoa and sugar co-ops in 15 countries around the world.
Mexico, of course, is one.
Grote would have made the trip a year ago. “Our
membership raised about $1,000 so I could go,” she said.
“It was really wonderful.” But a blizzard forced
cancellation of the 2005 flight; so, she was asked to go this
year, joined by seven counterparts from as close as Hanover,
N.H., and as far as Lincoln, Neb. And she did, flying initially
to Tuxtla Gutierrez, the capital of Chiapas province in southern
Mexico, via Houston and Mexico City.
The auto trip from Tuxtla to the town of San
Cristobal de las Casas was one of those memorable moments
as well, said Grote. “It was incredibly mountainous
with really winding mountain roads. And there we were, with
no guard rails, and looking down those cliffs, and people
passing us all the time as if they were on an interstate.
It was scary.”
And then there was the drive from San Cristobal to a smaller
town on another mountaintop, Simojovel, with a stop for lunch
in a village apparently under control of Zapatista rebels,
whom even
residents of South Royalton have read about.
“We had to give them our passports,”
Grote said. “But it was all right. We got them back.”
They talked briefly with some village men who wore masks and
then they ate lunch of rice, beans, a chicken dish and tortillas,
“and it was fantastic.”
The following day they drove – at least
that’s how the written trip itinerary phrased it –
to the final stop, a small community called Jose Castillo
Tielemans where the coffee farmers lived and where the band
started playing. But “drove” wasn’t the
word Grote used. “We were in a truck with high racks
and were just hanging on,” she gasped. “What a
crazy ride.”
The walk to the coffee trees came the day after.
“It made the walk up to Kent’s Ledge (in South
Royalton) seem like a breeze,” she remembered. For openers,
it was twice as steep and much, much longer. And there were
large stretches of mud, alternating with stretches of rock
and gravel. One of her colleagues had become sick that morning
and the hike didn’t help.
The 10 or a dozen native coffee farmers and
their sons and daughters who walked with them chatted and
laughed among themselves — “I think they were
laughing at us,” Grote said — and seemed barely
to be breathing hard. There were two young girls among them,
maybe eight or nine years old, and they were barefooted. This
was true of all girls and women, she noticed, whereas men
and boys wore shoes or sandals. The people of San Jose were
described to her as descendants of the Mayan Indians who once
populated Central America. They spoke their own language,
which posed interesting challenges because it usually required
two translators for each conversation.
She and her fellow co-op representatives were
taught how to pick the coffee cherries (“You have to
pick carefully. You’ve got to leave the stem because
that’s where the bud grows for next year”) and
were shown the results of pruning, of cutting grass away from
the trees and of reseeding. Coffee trees are relatively small
and grow beneath larger trees in mountainside forests. They
have four-year life spans, so constant reseeding is a must.
And carting the cherries (the coffee bean is
actually the cherry seed) back to the village is a manual
operation. No Ford F-150s or Dodge Rams here, but rather 100-pound
sacks carried on the farmers’ backs and held in place
by tump lines around their foreheads. Girls and women sometimes
take turns at this.
The visitors? “We took turns carrying
a maybe 50-pound bag,” said Grote, “and that was
hard enough.” The growers’ life “is so hard,”
she said of her newfound Chiapas friends. Back in the
village, there were tearful farewells amid more band music
(“They played literally 48 hours non-stop. The whole
village was in a festival mood”). But there were also
reminders of the hardships, some ironically brought on by
the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
A fair-trade advocate in Mexico, clearly a NAFTA
skeptic, told the visitors that the removal of tariff barriers
has led to an influx of cheap American goods that has undercut
local commerce and
cottage industries south of the border. This has led to increased
poverty and a growing tide of
illegal aliens into the U.S., he said.
But in South Royalton, the co-op’s tie
with Equal Exchange is doing its bit to help right this imbalance
in trade, Grote suggests. Sale of its products is growing
here, she says, especially the coffee. The co-op stocks Equal
Exchange’s tea, cocoa and chocolate as well. And shoppers
who buy the organic coffee can know that not only are their
dollars and cents going toward a guaranteed minimum for growers
but a premium for the organic product as well. The fair-trade
concept originated in Europe in the 1940s and has grown worldwide.
-Rory O’Connor
Special Thanks
This winter, Jennie Martin stepped down from
the Market’s Board of Directors after serving as secretary
for three years. This means that she took notes at every meeting
– including Annual Meetings – sent us minutes,
and kept us on-task and focused.
Before joining the Board, Jennie had worked
as an employee of the Market. Her insights as a former employee,
and her cheery spirit, are what we’ll miss the most.
Thank you, Jennie!
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