This is where I work...

Ejidos

...isn't it beautiful?

I've spent the last few days doing what would be considered hiking at home - trudging up and down muddy hills to different cafetales and milpas. Corn was recently planted in one of the communities I work in and the green is such a nice sight after all the dried corn stalks in the other communities I have been in for the past two months.

milpa

I really enjoy being in the fields. It is a different sort of conversation and it is a different sort of version of life...it is almost majestic. But the lives of these plants strike such a contrast with the lives of the people who tend them. And as Tia Irma said "you cannot eat beauty." You also cannot eat coffee. And so I continue to be amazed at the amount of scarce land that is taken up by coffee plants.

Ripe coffee bean

It's just about the end of the coffee harvest--the farmers usually do 4 different pickings and most folks I've talked to are somewhere between 'cutting' 2 and 4. In a few weeks there will be no more beans on the plants, the green coffee will be in sacks or be cafe oro (ready for shipment) and there will be a little bit of money in the hands of the farmers.

Coffee plant

Shade plot - cafetal

This year, the price that this community is receiving for their fair trade, organic certified coffee is 30 pesos per kilo. That works out to be about $1.09 a pound (with the conversion from metric to stupid and pesos to dollars). I know that the price of coffee is an old story, but seriously, this is insanely low for the amount of labor hours spent in the cafetal. In this community most farmers have between 1/2-2 hectares of coffee (and it's not contiguous land, some plots may be as far as an hour walk from their home and from other plots they work--did I mention hiking??). So, depending on the climate (which is changing, to the plight of farmers worldwide) and thus the harvest, farmers may get 200-300 kilos of beans depending on how much land they hold. Assuming even the best, 300 kilos will be sold for 9000 pesos this year. For a year of work in the cafetal that's about $720.00 at 30 pesos a kilo and converted at the average rate right now, which is about 12.5 pesos to the dollar.

Coffee is the second most traded commodity after oil. Despite the beauty of the cafetal, there is something very wrong with this picture.

The elevator version - Ixim

Without trying to bang out an abstract for part of my dissertation here is a little about what I've been up to in the last few days. Elevator style - er let's call it a 20 floor run, eh?

Due to circumstances beyond my control I actually did not end up on the caravan tour of coffee cooperatives that is now wending down through Guatemala. Instead, I ended up doing a series of interviews that will lend strength to the backbone of my dissertation argument.Very basically, my argument is that food is an essential element of building autonomy.

So even though I came here to talk to some farmers about this:

A 'frenchly' pressed Maya Vinic coffee

What I am really interested in is this:

Dried corn and beans just harvested

Dried corn

Ixim - Maize - Corn

But both taken together are the bulk of the agricultural systems in autonomous communities in the highlands. And why? You might ask. Because resistance is made up of agricultural acts, both those that contribute to the household in the form of edibles and those that contribute to the community in terms of cash income and solidarity networks.

"Then instead of grieving the rebel seeks other ways to build. Another world is possible."

And the upside is....

I feel good about what I'm getting done here. Let that be clear. But I hate being away.
However, today I am reminded there are apparently upsides:

I am still at roughly the same altitude though...

Tomorrow I'm off with the coffee roasters, who are chronicling their longer trip here (sadly I will not be tagging along on the rest--but it is mighty tempting).