Day 8 - About poverty
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We’ve now been hiking through coffee villages for four days. We’ve spoken with dozens of farmers and taken pictures with hundreds of villagers who always gather around us. The picture has become much clearer. So, how does a Malagasy coffee farmer live? Poorly. Most farmers are in such a dire financial situation that they pick much of their crop before the cherries are ripe. As a result, the yield is poor, and the coffee’s value is low. A closed circle. Why is it like this? Here’s a brief summary:
Too many children
In Estonia, after regaining our independence, we used to sing that “the land must be filled with children.” In Madagascar, the thought quickly came to us that perhaps the greatest help for these villages would be access to contraception. Families often have six or seven, sometimes even ten children. All of them need food, schooling, and at least some clothing and supplies. The fact that families are so large is one of the main reasons coffee farmers remain trapped in lasting poverty.
In Estonia, after regaining our independence, we used to sing that “the land must be filled with children.” In Madagascar, the thought quickly came to us that perhaps the greatest help for these villages would be access to contraception. Families often have six or seven, sometimes even ten children. All of them need food, schooling, and at least some clothing and supplies. The fact that families are so large is one of the main reasons coffee farmers remain trapped in lasting poverty.
Land is a limited resource
At the community level, the picture is equally dire if to look at the rapid population growth. More than 90% of the rural population is engaged in subsistence farming – fields cultivated not as a business, but primarily to feed one’s own family. Yet agricultural productivity is largely the same as it was 50 years ago. If every new generation is three times larger than the last, then every 20 years, you would need three times more land. That, of course, is impossible. The land available to each family shrinks with every generation, reducing flexibility in what can be grown and increasing vulnerability to climate risks.
At the community level, the picture is equally dire if to look at the rapid population growth. More than 90% of the rural population is engaged in subsistence farming – fields cultivated not as a business, but primarily to feed one’s own family. Yet agricultural productivity is largely the same as it was 50 years ago. If every new generation is three times larger than the last, then every 20 years, you would need three times more land. That, of course, is impossible. The land available to each family shrinks with every generation, reducing flexibility in what can be grown and increasing vulnerability to climate risks.
Lack of cooperation
We’ve been speaking with coffee farmers around the world for over a year now, and Madagascar is the only place so far where most farmers do not cooperate with one another at all. At first this was hard to believe, but we’ve heard the same story in every village. Even two neighbouring coffee growers do not work together when it comes to selling. Each tends to his own plot, finds his own buyer, and organises his own transport. The next village may be just three kilometres away, yet no one knows anything about the buyers there.
We’ve been speaking with coffee farmers around the world for over a year now, and Madagascar is the only place so far where most farmers do not cooperate with one another at all. At first this was hard to believe, but we’ve heard the same story in every village. Even two neighbouring coffee growers do not work together when it comes to selling. Each tends to his own plot, finds his own buyer, and organises his own transport. The next village may be just three kilometres away, yet no one knows anything about the buyers there.
And this is not like the Nordic type of solitude, where houses are kilometres apart. Here, villages are large and houses stand close together. Yet there is very little communal cooperation in improving livelihoods – at least when it comes to coffee.
The same holds true at the sector level. Madagascar is a big country, and maybe elsewhere things are different, but in the areas we’ve travelled, the farmer stands alone – selling to whatever middleman happens to be nearby when he has coffee to sell and needs cash. And this applies to everything grown and sold here.
That’s about all it takes to stay locked in poverty. Land use is inefficient, there’s less and less land per farmer, and no cooperation to improve quality or organise sales. The state’s presence seems to appear mainly in the form of police checkpoints along the roads, collecting “road taxes”, not to improve the roads, but to fill their own pockets.
In Daga, Papua New Guinea, the main problem was basically one thing: the lack of roads and access that kept coffee from reaching the market. Here, the problems are deeper and more complex. Quality is mostly below standard, since half-ripe beans are picked. Cooperation in the villages is absent, which means that to change anything, you would need to approach every single farmer individually and explain the benefits of collective action.
Infrastructure is non-existent – even a grower selling 5 tonnes of beans a year cleans them at home with a mortar and pestle. And corruption, and how it affects activity here and the export of goods, is both worrying and unpredictable.
Infrastructure is non-existent – even a grower selling 5 tonnes of beans a year cleans them at home with a mortar and pestle. And corruption, and how it affects activity here and the export of goods, is both worrying and unpredictable.
So, is Madagascar the right place for Renegade, and do we even in theory have a chance of making a difference here?
That’s a question for the next post…